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Allegory of the Alchemist's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Theme | #1 | 5.000 | 5.000 |
| Cleverness | #1 | 5.000 | 5.000 |
| Playability | #804 | 3.000 | 3.000 |
| Artistic Style | #970 | 3.000 | 3.000 |
Ranked from 1 rating. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Judge feedback
Judge feedback is anonymous.
- Good job on your first game jam entry! The concept is unique and I like your approach and what you've tried to do here. "Recipe Biffed" is unclear. Definition of 'biffed' seems to be to hit someone, so that means the recipe was a hit? :P Yet it seems to be treated as a failure. Perhaps a cultural issue here where the meaning is only understood by a certain group of poeple (e.g. a particular country) and not worldwide. I also got a '???' ingredient on my first attempt for the second playthrough. It feels like adding a curveball like that could be a way to make the game more difficult at a later stage of the game, but not on the first recipe! :D Good that you're thinking about how to add replayability and throw extra curveballs at the player, though! The 3D rotating of recipe ingredients is a nice touch, but I felt like it didn't add much that I couldn't see in the 2D view. Liquids fell to the bottles that I turned upside down, but otherwise it feels like you could explore this aspect more and hide things on the back or underneath objects that are only visible by rotating them - to give the mechanic more usefulness. You met the theme perfectly. Shadows and alchemy are definitely both involved here.
Did you include your Game Design Document as a Google Drive link?
Yes
Seriously... did you include your Game Design Document?
Yes! I even tested it with another google account :)
Is your game set to Public so we can see it?
Yes
Tell us about your game!
You are not born with knowledge of the world; you must bumble around in the dark for a while before you can learn to turn lead into gold.
Using only the shadows of alchemical ingredients, and your high-school-level alchemy knowledge, you need to pick out the right ingredients for a recipe that your shady friend brings you.
Extra Notes
This was my first jam and I had a lot of fun! Proud to have submitted something at all tbh :)
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Comments
Fun little game, though some of the ingredients were a little tricky to figure out. I think a score counter could have been a good addition, to see how many potions you can make before you run out of health :)
Thanks!
Yeah, I didn't get much of a chance for play-testing to tune the difficulty. Next time I'll start play-testing ASAP :P
And I totally agree with a score counter. I wanted to also make it so you would recover 1 heart after a successful mix, but I didn't have time to make it happen :(
Great use of the theme :) I love the idea of using the shadows to determine what the ingredient is. It’s nice and simple and easy to get the hang of. Well done for your first game jam.
Would love to know more about your shadow casting system, purely out of curiousity; I think that effect is really cool.
Thanks!!
The main shadows (bottles and solid ingredients) are just done with Unity's lighting system, with shadow quality bumped way up.
As for the colored liquid shadows, I actually had to cheat a little, using several colored spotlights with spot angle, color, and intensity set just right. The bottles are invisible 3D models that cast shadows, with a bunch of invisible sphere colliders inside of them. The spheres act as a very rough, first-order approximation of a liquid, so when you shake the bottle the spheres slosh around, roughly like a liquid would. If you then track those spheres with spotlights as they move around, it makes for something that looks like the shadow of a transparent liquid. But if you take the spotlights and point them at a random sphere every frame, it gives a shimmering quality to that liquid-shadow!
As my own harshest critic, I have to say that it looks a lot more convincing when the number of spotlights is close to the number of spheres in the bottle. In editor, I was using between 50 and 100 lights to point at 100 to 200 spheres, but WebGL restrictions made me cut down to just 7 lights for the same number of spheres. But all-in-all I'm happy with how it turned out :)