itch.io

TIP! If you need to delete your save file or are switching platforms, click around the H on the HELP SCREEN and then go back to the title to access the mastery hack, letting you unlock everything in the game!

TTS MOD HERE: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2833595191

It's ALL GOOD that your game isn't a strategy game! It's also ALL GOOD that you're struggling. It's really normal. I made at least a hundred, maybe a lot more tabletop prototypes that didn't work at all before I was able to start making some that did. Don't be too hard on yourself and just have fun :D

Gem Wizards Tactics

Thanks! :)

Really amazing! Beautiful art. Just a great mood, even without music or anything it's just like... weirdly enchanting. Great stuff!

Hey y'all! I actually put Gem Wizards Tactics on here a couple months ago, but I didn't realize that I could make a post about it on the community forum, so now I'm doing that. If you like turn based, thinky, surprising games, or if you like bumping monsters off of high ledges and watching them fall, this is the game for you, I think. This is a mostly 1 person development operation, I did about 95% of everything and I'm really proud of it.

We have five playable factions (plus a couple of fun bonus factions):

- The POTATOES - of course, what fantasy war game would be complete without a bunch of wizard potatoes. I don't think I need to say more about this, but here's the Splashmaster, who can blast units pretty far with their Splashblaster water cannon.

- The BUSINESS DEMONS - You got Bill Milton, the CEO who is really into fracking, you got Drill Sgts who love to drill for oil, you got Demon Dozers that pave roads as they move... it's just a bunch of business demons i guess

- The AZURE ORDER - They're like the royal / ice guys

- The NEVERENDING PARTY - A bunch of hard partying skeletons who are like punk rockers and also undead. They like to pop up out of coffins and yell stuff.

- The ALCOVE PREFEX - A high tech HACKING faction that has MECHAS and tanks and stuff! And a sniper!!

There's like 4 or 5 game modes, including a single-player RANKED mode that goes up to rank 20, and the game gets really really hard aroud there (I myself play at around rank 13 or so).

The game is also available on Steam, Google Play and iOS, and it's coming to Switch soon! Exciting! Let me know what you think so far, we're still doing more patches and stuff!

https://keithburgungames.itch.io/gem-wizards-tactics

Uploading 1.47 now! Which should be the last new version for awhile while we get the game on other platforms. Enjoy the new faction!

Absolutely! My apologies. We're also working on a killer 1.43 patch and I'll make sure that gets up here <3

Hi Julia! Thanks for playing :D

Yeah pawns basically just become other pieces, but they can also pick stuff up. The idea was that you'd place things in their path to get some "passive" income. It (like many things about this game) didn't really come together as I had planned. It was kind of an experiment and I think it sorta didn't work out, but I'm glad you like the idea of it!

Looks awesome Anna! Congrats!

I will make at least one more patch, possibly more, to fix bugs!! Coming soon!

Oops, sorry about that.

Yeah, that makes sense!

I would be honored if you would include Chess Mix into the mix!

https://keithburgungames.itch.io/chess-mix

Beat it! My favorite is the lamp in the top left room. But all the pixel art is really cool.

I answered my own questions at the end of this podcast ep: http://keithburgun.net/binary-goals-with-hopenager-and-kickstarting-an-18-card-g...

Hey everyone! First off it is so cool what a success this has been. We definitely should do something like this again soon. I'm gonna write an article about this game jam, because I think it went really great, and it'd be a good way to get your guys super cool games some more exposure. Steven Hutton had the great idea of doing short interviews with all of you and I can publish that in the piece. So! Please answer these questions if you want!

1. What was the process like for creating your game? How did the limitations influence your design?
   
2. How do you think it turned out?
   
3. Do you have future plans for this game?

Please respond with a reply here (or if you can't for some reason, you can PM me on discord). I'll give everyone a few days to answer these before compiling them and writing my article.

THANK YOU TO EVERYONE WHO SUBMITTED SOMETHING, AND TO EVERYONE WHO SIGNED UP!

OMG amazing!!! Thank you so much for this fantastic comment. Now I feel like I should put use this as an AD!

Yay! BTW the latest version is pretty awesome I think. First time I'm legitimately having fun with the game.

@LordGek ahh yeah sorry about that - it is fixed now.

Multiple units should not be able to share the same space, no. I'll look into that other bug.

Hi @AquaShame! Unfortunately this probably wouldn't be fair because the player reveals new information by moving forward, so undoing that is kinda like... drawing a card and then being like "actually nah" and undoing that! :)

Huh. That sounds like a bug actually! You can move units as many times as you want! Thanks for playing - gimme more feedback if you have any!

Hi Brentnor! Good question. That has since been fixed. Sorry about that! :)

https://itch.io/t/67604/how-to-get-a-steam-key-from-your-itchio-purchase

There's a section under Keys I think! Look around and you'll find it! It's there!

16 colors is indeed a good limitation, but you don't need to use *those* 16 colors. I would make a palette of your own with possibly even fewer - maybe 12 or even 8 colors. Setting your own palette will go a long way for giving the game an original look.

Hey Jason. Here is some feedback on the game.

- How does one "Show skill" in this game? The range of options turn to turn is VERY very small and any gameplay dynamics get flattened out quickly. How can this game be "hard" without just being random (i.e. dependent on good input randomness configurations)?
- Health potions are a bad idea. Right now the only long arc you have is health and that flattens it out. In fact when I see a potion on the ground there's a part of me that's like, let down by that because I can feel the game just getting repetitive.
- What is the objective? It seems like it's just screen after screen forever. EDIT: Ok i made it to Screen 10 and then it just said "I win". Does that mean I've mastered this game on the very first time I played it?
- It seems that whatever the objective is, the general game length is far too long? It feels repetitive, but that may be because of a lack of challenge.
- Movement is a little bit slow, I would speed that up, especially monster movement, things get clunky around floor 8-9.
- On the art: I would use more hue variation for the shadow tones and give the whole thing more of its own palette. Too many colors overall, and this is something easy to fix with such small sprites.

I believe we've talked before about your prototypes in the past and my feedback here is similar: you need a core mechanism. What is the basic action that you do, and how can we support that better? Right now I feel like you've basically melted down Rogue into its simplest possible form, but the problem is that there's no real core mechanism that you can build on. The entire game is basically "stuff coming at you down a pipe and hopefully you can hit it before it hits you, and sometimes there's hit point potions in the pipe". If you have a grid, I think you can make much better use of the grid.

Obviously coming up with a core mechanism is not easy so I can't tell you what you should do. But one thing I will say is that the "exploding walls" mechanism you have here is maybe a route towards a core mechanism. Maybe the whole thing is about creating holes, and walls spring back up, and you have to keep manipulating the grid in a way that's favorable. That is something that I could see having some depth.

Anyway, good luck, and good work so far.