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A jam submission

Checkmate MagicView game page

A chess-inspired ARPG roguelite where every move is a spell and waves of enemies crash across a cursed board.
Submitted by Adnonymous — 11 days, 16 hours before the deadline
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Checkmate Magic's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Innovation#883.3673.367
Graphics#1103.4333.433
Audio#2602.6672.667
Overall#2702.6672.667
Theme interpretation#2912.6002.600
Gameplay#3652.2002.200

Ranked from 30 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

GitHub repository URL
https://github.com/adnin/checkmate-magic/

Theme interpretation
I interpreted “WAVES” in several layered ways. First, the combat is built around literal waves of enemies: each wave spawns new foes, increases difficulty, and changes how you move on the board.

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Comments

Submitted

I really wanted this to work! It seems regardless of job, I could just press space bar and move around also it wasnt clear how to start the waves.

Art style is really cool though! i would definitely play a less buggy version of this!

Submitted

Artstyle? great. Game idea? fantastic. It needs some more time in the oven though. The UI is hard to read, I'd give some more tutorials if I were you. But don't give up on this because it's a great idea.

Submitted (1 edit)

Cool graphics for the game, but I had absolutely no clue what I was doing. I read the description and it said the attack was auto, but the dude was not attacking lol. Some enemy ran on top of me, and I was helpless. Could not run far enough away so that I would not die. Adding some information for the game in the start of the game would be very helpful. The game looks promising from the screenshots though so its a shame that I don't understand how to play it.

Submitted

Great artstyle!

Submitted

The graphic is nice, but I have no idea, how I can play with it.

Submitted

same

Submitted

slightly confused but i liked it

Submitted(+1)

For a long time I couldn’t get anything to spawn, until finally I accidentally pressed space and started the round. 3 pieces spawned, I had no idea what to do so I moved back to what i thought was a good place for a rook (my starting piece), one of the pieces moved diagonally - Aha a bishop! I thought - so i moved to an adjacent square where a rook would be safe from a bishop. He shot me in the face and i died instantly game over.

My point here is that you may want to think about including a tutorial or introductory phase. It seems like you’ve got some cool concept here, but it will be lost in confusion because your game lacks accessibility features / onboarding.

Great work in creating an original concept and good luck with your ideas.

Submitted

I agree 100%. You need to teach people how to do something before they can enjoy doing it. Try some playtesting next time, I'm sure you'd find that out after the first playtest

Submitted

No wave was starting for me. I was a knight walking around, the weapon was not equipable and nothing happened. Looks interesting, could you write an expanded tutorial to get started in the page?

Developer

sorry about that you need to double click the weapon to equip. 

Submitted

No worries. You can still edit the instructions on the page during the voting period.

Submitted

Cool concept, but had a hard time understanding how to play. I think the game would've been just fine with less content but with extra attention to player onboarding.


Really cool idea, I would push it if I were you!!

Submitted(+1)

Seems like a nice game but unfortunately after I collect two items on the board nothing happens. I move around the board but there is no enemies spawning at all. Am I doing smth wrong?

Developer

need to press space for next wave

Submitted

Thanks for the hint! 

I love the visuals and sounds and as I've said, this seems like an interesting concept. Overall, I can see you've put a lot of effort into this project.

But I personally failed to understand how to play. I think I did a couple hits on the enemies but I didn't fully parse the basic fighting rules of the game and eventually quitted

Submitted

Very nice pixel art, I love the art!

The concept seems very interesting, however I did not manage to understand how to play, despite several restarts and having read carefully the description. As already mentioned by others, some onboarding in game is probably necessary.

Maybe you can explain to me how to attack ? In the description it is written that it is automatic, however I have the feeling that my character never attacked anything or anyone and each run ended-up with me running around in a desperate attempts to trigger something and being kill after a while.

The "camp" level where you can press on the blacksmith and the portal could be improved a bit UX wise, at start I didn't understand what I was supposed to do and by clicking randomly I managed to open the blacksmith ui and press on the portail but other elements seemed to do nothing. Maybe those should be redesigned with better affordance in mind to make it clear what can be interacted with and what can't.

Audio is simple but effective, good job on that.

Overall I think the concept is interesting and I would have love to understand better in order to test it correctly. If you add some additional explanation (here or in description) I will probably come back to test again :)

I can see the connection with the theme as waves of enemies, but I am not sure to understand the others layers of interpretation. This is the same interpretation than many other entries and for me it is quite weak, but still it is related (I have seen much more irrelevant entries aha)

Also I looked a bit at your codebase (did not consider it for my rating, just out of curiosity), ++ for Godot <3 ! I like how you organized your files, never thought of adding a "root/" directory for the game code, I may stole the idea from you. Also I was curious about your autoloads script, it looks like you have scenes to which they are attached and that you autoload those scenes, is there a particular reason for that ? I tend to directly autoload the script so I was wandering if there are any advantages of doing it like you do :)

Good job!

Submitted

The art was super cute and I really love that it had a character creator in the beginning. I found the gameplay a little confusing but eventually got the hang of it. A tutorial would have been really helpful. In addition, I wish there was a bit more sound design and music throughout. Overall though - keep working on it and I look forward to seeing how it develops!

Submitted

I agree with "MyLeg" here, a small tutorial would be much appreciated. Generally speaking it is much better to include the knowledge of how to play in the game itself rather than to write it down on the itch page, because people usually don't read it unfortunately. After reading and commiting though, the game is very polished and looks quite amazing, nice job on that!

Thanks for making this game, great job! :)

Submitted

Love the art! I found the game fairly confusing, but eventually started to piece it together - I think a in-game tutorial would be helpful! But overall great job!

Submitted

I love the art, game is pretty fun to