Whoa, the endless mode is a great idea. Wish we’d thought of that in time to add it. Definitely something to add after the jam.

Glad you like the line drawing mechanic. We iterated a bunch of the way that worked, and tried very hard to make the line drawing be tied to the character movement and aiming, but also allow for skill expression when throwing the quill around.

Thank you so much! Glad you liked the writing and the game feel. And yeah, we were super happy when we first got that shader working for the ink line :)

Thanks so much!

Yeah, the enemies can definitely stick to the edges a bit. We tweaked that at one point so it’s better than it used to be, but could definitely use a bit more work. The trick with capturing them is to get some momentum with the quill before you throw it, and the hold the mouse button down to extend the throw and move laterally so that it sweeps a larger arc before returning. But it definitely takes some practice. You can see an example in one of our GIFs on this page. It’s the second one in the gallery at time of writing.

Thank you so much!

Thanks so much, glad you liked the art, and glad you had fun!

Totally hear you on the controls. We iterated a bunch but probably needed another day at least to get them fully where we wanted them. The main thing that is not very obvious is that the throw is influenced significantly by the initial momentum before the throw, which can be affected by both the player movement and the movement of the mouse within the spell circle radius. Then, after you throw, if you hold the mouse down it will go further, and you can continue moving the player and the aim direction to influence the quill in-flight.

Thanks so much! We worked really hard on the artwork and were super pleased when we first got that shader working for the ink line.

We tweaked the controls so much including a few fundamentally different approaches, but ended up happiest with these. We liked the momentum mechanics and the high skill ceiling for the pen flinging, but it definitely could be further improved by more tweaking.

Thanks! Glad you liked it!

Thank you!

Ooh, that’s an interesting idea. The lunging enemies flash red before they lunge, which helps to telegraph where they will be, it might be interesting to investigate ways to make things easier to predict.

Thank you!

Glad to hear it! Thank you for playing!

Thanks so much!

Thanks! Yeah, it can be a bit challenging to figure out. You basically have 4 main options. Roughly from easiest to hardest they are:

1. Just run in a circle around the enemies while dragging the quill with you.
2. Make most of a circle and then throw the quill across to finish the loop.
3. Make most of a circle and then dash across to finish the loop. You do have I-frames during the dash so it’s a good tool in your arsenal.
4. This is the hardest one, but also the most satisfying. Get some momentum by dragging the pen within your spell circle radius, and then click and hold to let it fly. The pen will make its way back to you, but by moving somewhat perpendicular to the direction you threw it and adjusting your aim direction you can make it take more of a looping flight path. It is even possible to get it to miss you on the return and orbit a bit (but you must keep holding the mouse button to do that).

I have uploaded some GIFs now which demonstrate some of these techniques.

Thank you so much! Glad you liked it!

Thank you! Always great to hear that it seems to be mostly bug-free!

For the combat, fun-tricky is definitely what we were aiming for. The skill floor is definitely a bit high, but once you figure out how to do the swoopy pen throws and close some big loops around multiple enemies it can get very satisfying.

We’d love to add more content! Maybe we’ll be able to pick this up again after the jam.

Aw, thanks so much! Hopefully we’ll get more ratings soon :)

Totally hear you on the pen controls. We went back and forth and tried a bunch of different control schemes. We were trying to strike a good balance between having some limited mouse influence over the pen’s path while it’s flying around but also ensuring that positioning of the player character played an important role. We would probably iterate a bit more if we had more time, but we liked where we ended up. You can get some very swoopy pen movement if you kind of swing into the throw and hold the mouse button down.

Thank you for the kind words on the narrative, art, and music! We were very pleased that we were able to bring all those pieces together.

Thank you!

Thank you so much! The satisfying feeling when completing a loop was one of the big game-feel points we were aiming for, so we’re glad it landed!

Thank you! And yeah, totally hear you on that. Enemies hugging the edges was a larger issue at first, because some of them enemies have avoidant behavior. We tweaked it a bit to make it less frustrating, but there’s definitely more tuning would would have liked to do with all the enemy behaviors if we had more time.

Thanks so much! Glad you liked it!