Indie game storeFree gamesFun gamesHorror games
Game developmentAssetsComics
SalesBundles
Jobs
Tags
A jam submission

Arthur Young: Magician of SoulsView game page

A text-based story with spell-slinging combat.
Submitted by earmuffs, MrMoon — 1 day, 6 hours before the deadline
Add to collection

Play game

Arthur Young: Magician of Souls's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Art Direction#1713.2863.600
Game Design#2232.9823.267
Innovation#2492.8603.133
Overall#2822.8363.107
Fun#2942.6782.933
Theme#3552.3732.600

Ranked from 15 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

Leave a comment

Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.

Comments

Submitted

Streamed your game (first game), my feedback is my commentary!

Developer

Nice stream! I ended up checking out the other games you played.

As for our game, don't feel bad about not finishing it! We unfortunately ran out of time before adding hints for the casting system. Your gameplay and commentary was very informative, so we've added some new fixes/polish ideas on our post-jam TODO list.

Cheers!

Submitted

I am a sucker for text based adventures. Some of my absolute favorite types of games. The writing in this game is pretty good! It has some character, although there weren't any characters outside of our young hero I encountered that had much screen time to have their personality show, aside from Bungus (great name by the way). The UI is really clean, the art is great, and it feels like a well built text based adventure game. 

There were a few things to note, though. I am completely confused by the combat. It took me a bit to realize that I click and drag from the glyph to the type of spell, either bolt or storm, but the weird thing is that storm never seemed to do any damage no matter what glyph I had. I could see the animation specifically when I tried a storm with a wind glyph, but it never did any damage. I had to rely on bolt, which of course, wasn't reasonable, given that it only targets one thing, and you're often facing groups. I died...

Which leads me to glitch number one: I died, had negative health, and I... didn't die? I thought it was intentional at first. Like, a way for the player to progress through the story if they died. The reason I say that is because, whenever I would get into a fight, it would INSTANTLY end the encounter before I could see the battle screen for more than a few frames. But I restarted the game, to see if I could figure out the combat better, and I died, which forced me to restart the game like I'd initially expected. 

During this restart, I died again (I can't tell if the combat is too difficult or if I'm missing an aspect of it), and the glitch happened again, but it was a little different this time. After getting over a certain wall, encountering certain characters and having a certain chicken stolen, the game broke for me. It popped up a button to continue dialogue, I pressed it, the button disappeared, and the text disappeared from the dialogue box. I tried casting spells just to see, and my mana stopped regenerating. There was nothing I could do but quit the game, and at this point I ended my run. 

I think this game has a lot of potential. In fact, I really like it, and want to see what happens, it's got me hooked. But between the combat and the glitches, I wasn't able to see the adventure through to the end, and that makes me a bit sad. If this game could be fixed from its current state, I would genuinely really love to continue, because there is so much good stuff here, and there really aren't a whole lot of text based games being made nowadays. 

Please don't take this as me roasting your game. There was so much good stuff here, I truly mean that. 

Developer(+1)

I appreciate so much your feedback. Unfortunately, the points you mentioned were actually known errors / wrong behaviors that weren't able to be fixed in time for the submission for the game Jam. Also, the reason one of prompts in the cavern doesn't go anywhere is because I forgot to have a room that mentions that the game stops there for now. That's my bad. 

We want to work on a lot of feedback mechanics for the player to understand better the combat and to make a tutorial to make it even better from the start. 

We have so many plans already for plot points of the story and I am interested in continuing with my programmer friend to make the game a little bit more stable and even finish it.

Thank you for your comment.

Submitted(+1)

Nice game! I don't usually play games like this but there is a lot here to admire. I really like the way the little light on the cursor interacts with the UI. The art is capable. The writing is good too. The Bungus gag was funny!

Seems like the spell casting could be pretty fun but I got my butt kicked in every fight :( 

Well done overall!

Submitted

You accomplished some quality dialogue! I was always happy to read more banter involving Bungus.

Combat was a bit unclear to me though. I don't know if there's a targeting system I missed or maybe some sort of defensive skill, but I ended up just spamming spells, hoping they would be enough to take out the enemies. It was enough to get me past the slime fight, but my journey ended at the goblins' hands.

Overall, an entertaining experience!

Developer

Unfortunately, the feedback to the player during the combat was something that suffered because of the time constraints. It is far from completed. F.y.i. The targeting was actually the direction of your mouse when you hold to cast magic. Depending on where the spell effect goes the closest, it will attack that enemy. When there is a single enemy, the spells curve automatically to the last target.

Thank you for trying it out. Our main goal after the game jam is to tweak a few things to make a better game and your comment will help improve it.

Submitted(+1)

really nice job! good work :)

Submitted(+1)

the UI its really good and the history seems really intriguing, the only problem was after bungus got missing the text bubbles stop appearing. Hope when the jam end could play the entire thing.

Submitted(+1)

Lot of reading, but if you like that kind of thing it's fine. I like the spell mechanic.

Submitted(+1)

Overall from an art and storytelling perspective this game is very well done. The combat though wasn't very clear and didn't really understand what was happening. I then was dropped to -1 hp and still won the fight!

Overall good job!

Submitted

The story is well written and really engaging. I really wanted the explore the combat because it looks interesting but there's a bug that skips the combat. Following some poop to find Bungus was hilarious but unfortunately I cant seem to progress after that. Still nice work!

Developer

Thank you for your kind words. Are combat system is still a little buggy and maybe not easy without any instructions. We thought about adding a tutorial for explaining the combat. I have tried to make the story serious, but not too serious.. I think Bungus as a character brings a lot of funny moments. I think when I can rift off of two characters, its hard to make the game not just a book. The story is the main thing, but still, we want some fights and maybe some more choices in the story.

Again thank you for trying it out.

Well made, great presentation. I encountered a bug it seems. I fought the 3 wolves at the start and ended up with -2hp. Then all the other fights were skipped and I always won. The dialogue was pretty good. Great effort.

Developer

Yeah, we had a few bugs last-minute. The wolf fight needs to be balanced a bit. Thanks for the feedback!