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Call of Aether
Call of Aether
By coda-highland and Immamoonkin
View on ldjam.com
| Category | Rank | Score | Count |
|
|---|
| Overall | 701 | 3.47 | 35 | |
| Fun | 1023 | 2.97 | 35 | |
| Innovation | 307 | 3.68 | 35 | |
| Theme | 142 | 4.24 | 35 | |
| Graphics | 634 | 3.66 | 35 | |
| Humor | 727 | 2.78 | 32 | |
| Mood | 627 | 3.50 | 33 | |
Comments
Stuck? **SPOILERS FOLLOW.**
Milder spoilers: * Spirits like it when you talk to them with the same rune in both slots. * Fundamental spirits are scared of the opposite rune. Advanced spirits respect the opposite. * Only the fundamental spirits offer gifts. Only the advanced spirits desire them.
Direct spoilers: * Gnome, Undine, and Sylph can teach Augmend of Offering if you try to give them something. * Sylph teaches Augmend of Receiving once you have talked to all four of the initial spirits with doubled runes. * To get the Quintessence rune, summon with Lightning+Wood or Wood+Lightning, and Rain+Metal or Metal+Rain. * Aether won't talk to you until you have given a gift to each of the advanced spirits.
mxbi
2024-04-16 21:12
This was super interesting! Lots of new gameplay. Also I love the candle lighting, nice touch
But I found it a bit frustrating trying to figure everything out by trial and error and needed the hints. It would be really cool to see how you can adjust the gameplay to make it easier to figure things out without trying every combination (which can get boring). But good foresight with the spoiler message.
wombatty
2024-04-16 21:13
Loved the idea here, and the vibey candle effects. I think it could have done from some sound effects and maybe more continuous goals or hints though - it became a bit hard to progress after a while
@mxbi @wombatty Thanks for playing! I'm glad you liked the effects.
I would have loved to polish the interactions more to help with the guidance, but I spent too long on the graphics and didn't leave enough time to implement the actual gameplay. :sweat_smile: I was fixing game-breaking bugs in the endgame all the way up to the deadline.
I usually care a lot about the sound design in my games but I just straight up didn't have time this time.
The game had really cool effects. I like how the runes would draw every time. It seems very polished for the amount of time we had!
@seanmercer Thanks! Truthfully I have regrets about how much time I spent working on the VFX, and the circles get ALL KINDS of screwed up if your computer lags while drawing -- I should have implemented that differently.
This is a cute little game! It makes me think of combinations. I adore all the art for the spirits. I honestly loved just looking at each of them for a while. The circle drawing animations were fantastic and really added to the mystical atmosphere.
For me, the main drawback was having to flip all the way through the book to get to the symbols I wanted to try, killing the pacing a bit. It was also hard to keep track of the combinations I had already tried.
Overall this was a fun little time and I enjoyed trying to puzzle everything out! I eventually just hit a point trying to give gifts where I wasn't sure what to do next.
@mistiemaedae Thanks for the feedback! I've passed along your comment about the spirits to the artist.
I got comments from other people offline about the book being a clumsy way to navigate, and I think it's a good point.
This was such a cute little experience and such a good twist on the "combination"-type of gameplay. The narrative stuff lending itself towards more directed progression went a lot longer way than I was expecting!! I would love to see this a little more polished in regards to in-game controls guidance, but so cool overall :)
alzhu1
2024-04-18 04:26
Very cool visual novel style game! I mostly agree with some other feedback here, like how it felt a little too based in trial-and-error, and the speed of the page turning being too slow if you're flipping through it often. I did need some spoiler hints, but was able to complete the game. Some ambient music would be great to add to the experience, but overall I enjoyed this quite a lot, it's very unique!
Really fascinating game, and an impressive work for jam game at that. Took me a long while to finish the game as well, I am impressed by the depth here. Really enjoyed exploring the combinations, although my one critique is that you have to take an excessive amount of time flipping through the book to explore them all.
akusan
2024-04-18 08:34
Pretty cool concept. Definitely fits the summoning theme. It's like an RPG.
Cool concept! It was a bit frustrating to figure all the combination out on my own. But I like the idea a lot! Maybe the spirits could give you a small hint after you failed with a few combinations?
whalejam
2024-04-18 16:40
This is cool, I love the animations for the summoning circle and the way each spirit has its own personality and they like you more or less depending on what you draw alongside their rune. It would be nice to not have to flick through many pages of a book as it is quite slow, but I do like the atmosphere of it, it feels quite grand having a page per rune, it make them feel important. Nice job ^^
kseniya
2024-04-18 17:03
A nice game! It was interesting
Very nice work. A little tricky, but very beautiful. A solid entry. I really like the simplicity of the concept and the puzzle aspect to finding the right combinations. I did have to use your spoiler/cheat sheet. But again, a great game! Good job!
nivarian
2024-04-19 23:42
You did such a good job with the theme and made an elegant game that looks good. Well done!
I enjoyed this little demon-summoning narrative :D
itskdog
2024-04-21 00:09
Nice job. Maybe needed some feedback when it doesn't summon and could use a reset button.
someone
2024-04-21 00:25
Interesting game. I like the drawing effects. I enjoyed the interactions, but trying every combination of things was a bit tedious.
@itskdog There is a reset button, in the menu that comes up when you hit the charcoal. You generally shouldn't need it, which is why I didn't make it more prominent. But I do think I agree that some more feedback would help.
darkwolf
2024-04-21 03:09
I like the concept and all of the art you have fits with the game very well and looks good. Like others have said, turning the pages feels a bit slow when you are trying a lot of combinations. The two bugs I found were that if I didn't have the confluence circle and put something in the offering slot, it would summon the basic fire spirit with an empty center circle. The other bug is that everyone says that the alchemist's stone would be better for another spirit, but there doesn't seem to be one that will accept it. I might be missing something, but otherwise I would suggest making them say that the player should keep the stone, or something like that.
Despite the lack of sound, it seems nicely polished and with maybe a quick reference for the runes and some notes on what you've tried it would make for a great puzzle/social game.
@darkwolf The second one isn't a bug -- once you have the Alchemist's Stone, you've completed the game, and there's nothing more to do with it.
The first one is something that has been reported to me by someone else too, and it's kind of weird... I'm not sure why it would behave that way.
Fun to see the summoning circle get more complex as the game goes on. Really well done!
cool game. maybe a bit too long. I just started clicking random things when I didn't know what to do. very nice visuals.
Very cute! So many dialogue options, so much content. Since this game involves a lot of trial and error (I recieved some darkened matter stuff and then did not know what to do anymore), it would be nice to navigate the symbols a bit faster. Maybe a menu with all symbols where you can select one by clicking on it.
Thanks for all of the comments!
@anton-florey Ask Undine to transmute the Darkened Materia to turn it into Cleansed Materia. Gnome and Sylph will also need to be involved to purify it more, and then Aether will turn it into the final form. And yeah, a symbol menu is one of the interfaces I was considering.
@soundgnome I'm glad you liked that! My wife drew out a design that I really wanted to make work, but it was just way too complicated to work with the way I had set up the drawing routine.
@spexxilove Clicking random things is kind of the way the elemental-alchemy genre of games works. ^^() I tried to make it a little less arbitrarily random but I know I could have done better with communicating it. I ran out of time, which is why I had to give spoilers instead of weaving it into the dialogue.
semenov
2024-04-22 07:10
what happens if you mix alchemy and summoning creatures? This game is correct. It was fun to play, thank you!
The spirits are cute! It's also fun to figure out the combination of stuff, sometimes a bit puzzling to me. It might be a good choice to add audio into the game, which can keep the player playing for longer.
dymino
2024-04-25 14:43
Very interesting game. I feel like the lack of music lets it down but otherwise it was a good game. It probably wouldn't have been too hard to just have some sound effect play as the text appears or have some very simple music, like just having one or two notes held down could create some atmosphere. I feel like sometimes you can easily get lost if you don't know the specific combination you need. Also I feel like there was no reason to ever erase an Augmend, so why do you have to option to do that? Anyways, nitpicking aside it was quite a good game.
@creeper-nade @dymino Normally I care a lot about the sound design of my games! I usually put in sound effects at least, and I try to write music for them, but I just totally ran out of time this time.
@dymino If you don't have any items, you can't summon any spirits if the Augmend of Offering is drawn. And since you only ever need to successfully offer items four times, not being able to remove it could get you stuck if you do things in the wrong order. I would rather have polished up the UX so that it wasn't necessary, because I do absolutely recognize that the current approach is a hack that was necessary to make the game playable, but with six hours left before the deadline I was focusing on making sure the game could be completed at all.