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Wand Revolutionary's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Originality/Creativity | #1 | 4.222 | 4.222 |
| Engagement/Fun | #7 | 3.333 | 3.333 |
| Overall | #9 | 3.262 | 3.262 |
| Polish | #10 | 2.833 | 2.833 |
| Audio | #10 | 3.222 | 3.222 |
| Theme Interpretation | #11 | 3.278 | 3.278 |
| Graphics | #12 | 2.889 | 2.889 |
| Magical Girl Concept | #13 | 3.056 | 3.056 |
Ranked from 18 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
How does your game fit the Magical Girl Genre?
The main character is a mostly traditional-style Magical Girl
Which theme(s) did you pick?
Stone Ocean/Diamond is Unbreakable
How does your game fit the theme(s)?
The primary mechanic is matching gems (diamonds/stones). These diamonds may be breakable, but the Magical Girl spirit is not.
Were the graphics/audio assets for your game made during the jam?
All assets made/edited by me were made during the jam. A full list of purchased assets is listed on the itch page.
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Comments
Very solid puzzle combat! Once I got over the initial confusion, the controls became pretty intuitive! The pace gets pretty exciting and frantic in the later rounds. I did find myself wishing at times for an actual wheel moving animation to help me follow what I was doing but I can see that becoming annoying as well. Other than that, I really have no complaints! Great work!
I had no clue what I was doing at first, then I sorta got it. It was pretty fun actually. Fast paced with lots of combos. Pretty good game.
Interesting gameplay. At first it's overwhelming, and the control scheme is unorthodox, but eventually you get into it. It does have quite a lot of puzzle elements, where you have to try to match the right color before you get defeated. It's a little easy to just spam the buttons and rely on luck though.
The graphics are pretty rough. But despite mixing many different assets, it manages to look decent. The gems are easy to tell apart by color and shape, but I wish they had different sounds as well. Sometimes you're not exactly sure what you just got and have to glance at the center of the rings. Some animation for when the rings are turning would be nice too, right now it's not always clear which way the wheels are turning or what's happening exactly. In general, more animation and visual effects would really help communicate the state of the game to the player.
Nice first game, well done!
I really like the concept! Positioning the matching game as a RPG battle was a great idea. I think it could have done with a proper interactive tutorial instead of just the instructions page but once I got it it fit together really well, with your combos converting into 'moves' that you could cast. The poppy sound and the graphics were a good fit, and it was a very smart use of asset packs that felt vaguely homogenous even though they came from a variety of sources.
That said, I think it's probably a bit too hard. Even once I had gotten to grips with selecting the right wheel and spinning it, I found it difficult to see at a glance what combos were possible and what was impossible. Add a timer on top of that and it became very very hard to keep track of what was going on.
The magical girl theming could have probably been more explicit or more tied into it overall, but the cutscene at the beginning got you pretty far over the line in that regard I think haha
Specific bugs:
1) Backed out to menu from in-game and the menu music began playing simultaneously with the game music. Recommend making sure the game stops any currently playing audio (store it in a var when playing and you can check to see if audio_is_playing before running new music)
This game has a fun concept! I've been a fan of plenty of matching games, and mixing that with the magical girl battling was a great idea! The GFX and audio all work well, and the intro is cool.
The gameplay itself was very hard at first. Even after reading the instructions, I found it difficult. After a couple losses, I started to get the hang of it. In the end though, I discovered the most effective strategy was just spamming keys like crazy, and only slowing down to think if my timer was getting low. In a way, this IS a strategy, but possibly not the intended one. (This strategy got me through all the enemy types)
If I had to say, it's problem the control scheme that led me to this strategy. I don't have a solution of the top of my head, but the controls were complicated enough that I had a hard time using them deliberately .
Still, I had a good time overall, and with a little tweaking this could be a ton of fun!
Took me a bit to get the hang of it, but once I did it was pretty fun. The sound effects for matching are a bit too loud, my brother got mad at me cause he could hear them halfway across the house lol.
I think you should stack the effects of the matched gems. It's really hard sometimes to get a match at the end of the color you were going for. Would be nice if you could just focus on matches and then burst every once and a while.
I'll open this with a disclaimer that I suck at puzzle games.
I really like the concept of this game. Match gems to use powers, it's neat and different and magical as heck. The intro is fantastic, the pixel art is nice, and the music and sound goes great with it.
I found this game really obtuse, to be honest, and the first round is so fast-paced that you don't really have time to figure it out before you died for some reason which greatly exacerbates the issue.
On my fourth try, after re-reading the instructions twice, I managed to figure it out. I still didn't get very far, because again, I suck at puzzle games.
There were a few mental blocks I had to overcome to get to that point:
1) It's not clear what each symbol does.
There's only a vague correlation between the appearance of each symbol and it's effect. It would break the gem theme a bit, but it would be much more obvious with more explicit symbols. I thought maybe it should show an animation when you match a symbol showing what it does, but see item 3 below.
2) It's not clear where matches happen.
I had assumed that only symbols lined up in the box on the right would be matched. But then I saw symbols inexplicably disappearing and the match sound playing. After a round or two I realized that a match anywhere in the ring counted. I then wondered what the heck the box outline was for. More explicit animations or graphics might help but I don't have any specific suggestion here.
3) It's not clear that you have to use your powers once you have matched symbols.
I assumed this game was broken for a good ten minutes. I kept matching the red symbol to do damage, but no damage was being done. I chalked it up to a glitch. Tried it again. Tried a different game mode. Restarted the game. Finally re-read the instructions and realize that you need to trigger the action with the spacebar. I thought the number in the middle was some kind of score indicator. Maybe this could be addressed with a stronger indication of hey, you need to take an action here.
There's one that I never figured out, but realized after reading the comments:
4) It's not clear that you can swap symbols between rings.
See number 2 and my false assumption. I'm not sure if you want this, to be honest. The game is already way complicated for its fast pace IMO, but once again, I'm not good at puzzle games so maybe it's just overloading my useless brain.
The other thing is I'd really like to see animations for the rings spinning. It's not a mental block thing per se, but sometimes it felt like things were just happening and there wasn't any illusion of motion.
Although I found it too complicated for me, I think it's a decent game once you get to the point of understanding how it works. Unfortunately, the game really doesn't help you get there as it stands.
Thank you for the feedback, it's very helpful. It seems like a more explicit tutorial should be a top priority, as well as a better indicator that the right row can rotate.
There is actually an animation when you make a match, a copy of the gems moves into the middle of the circles and fades away.
The wheel movement animations were definitely on my "cut due to time" list, and would likely help some.
A tutorial would help, but ultimately it's a bandaid solution. In general better, clearer indicators of what things do and what can be done at any given point in time is what is needed. I think you're on the right track, and I think there have been suggestions from other folks in this area as well.
The intro with all the little running townsfolk is wonderful. The animations are very cute especially the slime thing and how my player falls over. Controls feel responsive and I like how the big rings light up. Honestly I don't quite understand how I'm supposed to play but then again I just jumped into arcade mode and started mashing the buttons.
Really good game. It's a lot of fun to play and once you get a hang of the controls you can get quite far. I still don't quite understand though how the abilities are decided as sometimes you get two and at other times only one.
Thanks!
The most recent match is shown in the central area. So if you make a move where you match both Red and Blue, you would use the abilities of both. If you would then match a red alone, the last match would become red. White doesn't have an ability itself, so if you match it alone, it doesn't change the last matched combo.
The game mechanics has potential. It's satisfying when there is multi-combo in one big spin. probably good for mobile game if the control is more simplified (well. i am talking about mobile platform).
>These diamonds may be breakable
THIS IS BLASPHEMY /s
EDIT: Actual review of game
The good: This is definitely fun. The game mechanics definitely allows for a lot of strategizing; really got me thinking a lot while playing. Putting the ability indicator at the center and adding some tense music when the timer is about to run up is very helpful too. The music is also awesome.
The bad: Well later on in the game it is way too fast to think, and the effective strategy that I found is simply to mash some buttons to rake up points then aim for whatever effect I want at the last -- or maybe this is the intended way to play indeed XD. The control for selecting the rings at ASD is also a little big clunky; I think using 123 instead is more intuitive but I will let you judge that. Also while the polishing is already okay, I think with still ~2 days remaining, you may want to polish this a little bit more, in particular from what I think should be from easiest to hardest:
Also: my high score: 114387. I died once the enemy attack power reaches 7
Thanks for the feedback!
Funnily enough, I actually just found out about WASD games being odd on other language keyboards last night (it makes sense, but it had never crossed my mind as an issue), and so I was already going to change the inputs from ASD to 123. I've also added a sound effect for the Timer Up, as that was definitely a glaring omission.
Unfortunately, part of the reason I'm releasing a little early is that I'm just not going to be able to work on the game much the next few days due to Real Life, and the enemy/wheel animations were what I had to sacrifice. I've definitely got a bunch of ideas for further releases of the game to go along with those animations.