Love the 3d models and animations! It does indeed feel like magicka + vampire survivors, albeit the mix has one issue: the vampire survivor part feels like the predominant one (it's easier to just walk; it doesn't make sense and it's actually difficult trying to cast something while avoiding monsters *and* clicking / targeting). It feels like too many things to juggle for little gain - one can simply walk. Very early on I felt that the automatic spells did all the work for me. As for the casting, I never played much magicka but from what I remember that game (and helldivers to some extent) force you to really learn the patterns and diversify. I don't see much need for trying to do different combinations here - once I learned to do "the bomb" (my name for the light circle haha) I just spammed that. If I'm honest, I have absolutely no idea what the actual math for combinations is - I mashed buttons until something happened. My way of playing wasn't effective, but once I discovered "the bomb" I knew how to reproduce it and I just went for it. There's still a lot of potential here though, hexing and surviving is a fun combo :)
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Indeed! I also think this combination has some potential but its an incredibly tough challenge from a game design perspective. Both vampire survivor and magicka are incredibly well built, very complex games from a design perspective. I'm considering doing away with passive weapons altogether and go pure active because they can't really seem to mix properly. And frankly the combos are not fully implement so there's hardly any benefit to cast more than one glyph, as can be seen by reviews about everyone spamming a single ability. The selection of abilities needs a rework as well, I chose them based on actual Vampire Survivors weapons (like the dark circle being a direct analogy to pentagram and hex flask is just santa water). But that selection doesn't really seem to work out when the player has full control over what weapons they get to use. Not to mention I didn't have the time to lay out an ability matrix to figure out what effects what combos would have to then adjust it. So when you cast more than one glyph all you get is a stat boost which is hard to tell unless you're actively counting damage markers.
I'm still pretty happy with how it turned out especially considering this is the first game I've actually made, I spent years learning about every backend system that goes into a game engine but never really put that together into an actual product before. For example, the outlines you see are made by reading the depth buffer, and that required me to create a custom depth buffer directly using opengl commands without relying on raylib, its also the reason I put a giant warning on the description saying *please let me know if you encounter any graphical issues*. So far the only failure I've seen is on a 15 year old computer that just refused to render the game.
I think I will definitely try to polish this into a better game after the gamejam, the mechanics will need a lot of thought to actually nail down. And I need to make it so players can't live indefinitely by just walking around. Because thats something you can do right now if you're good at herding.