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The demo was already amazing! Its ending in particular made my day as I was paying attention to some early dialog hints (trying to be vague to not spoil others reading this). I didn't notice it somehow, but maybe remove the related screenshot to keep it hidden.

Also all the delicious-looking-fruit-picking made me crave apple juice.

Only critiques are for early on:
a) I'd have preferred a bit nicer intro rather than reading a block of text.
b) I'd have liked some very minor plant upgrade to be added halfway between the berries and the first tree - it was the only point where I was at risk of quitting, and a dopamine trigger was sorely needed.

A nice cozy experience. :-)

Thanks a lot Tom! (and I guess dad too)

Would only like for roads to be just a tad meaningful - like buildings increasing rent if they are sufficiently near one or something.

Thanks a lot for the kind words!

I will definitely add a tutorial after the jam ends. Will probably include some very short in-game dialogue or something similar to also give hints at difficult puzzles.

Thanks a lot for playing and the feedback! 

I am not sure what you mean to be honest.
Do you mean to say that any fae should be able to flip the coin to any side to more varried options?
If so, then it's an excelelent point!
(This is what I was going for originally, but the simplification with only one useful side was one of the consessions I made in order to find time for other things in the three-day development.)

Nice game and good mechanics!

I would have only liked to see a number of the fae's and mine health, so that I can translate the coin numbers to meaningful progression.

I think getting a rough idea about each fae's attack capabilities would also be nice.

Nice fun game!
I found the bills really well executed both visually and as a mechanic.

Everything abot this game is great, from the art and music to the mechanics!

Only shortcomming was that: it was a little too difficult for me -I have not played too many shooters to have good targeting skills- to go past more than one room of enemies. Maybe add some progression on the difficulty at the beginning? (e.g., number of enemies) 

Good job! I had a fantastic time with this.

I would maybe want to know (through side-allusions in the text) how previous decisions affected next options (if there is such a thing). 

Great atmosphere (music, graphics) and the text drew me in.

Playtesting feedback:
- Maybe have a text indication of what the things picked from the ground and the ongoing damage are.
- I could not use the ranged attacks (do I need to find ammunition?).
- It was not  clear to me what was a door and what only a decoration (e.g., I tried to climb a couple of stairs.

Good job on the game and gameplay! 

Definitely seeing this becoming a hit if you continue development post-jam.

Some small points you might want to consider going forward:
- It felt like I was turning a little too fastly for a ship, though this might just be me.
- It was kind of a bummer that I could not trick the enemies into shooting each other.

Nice concept and implementation!

Funny concept and relaxing gameplay and music. Great experience overall!

Would have liked some more sound effects, and a smidge faster take-off.

Even though the genre is not my cup of tea, this was great. 

Aside from the graphics and battle system, the clever humor was the best!

Much appreciated that you played so much and thank you for the input!

Presuming that you mean that you got stuck often in the last stages only, where NPCs are introduced, I am still not sure if this is the actual issue or not. In my mind, I want the player to try to move away from the NPCs unless they glitch, but if this creates frustrating experiences then I need to re-examine it. Maybe the true issue is that NPCs clogg the way after you unglitch them?

The last level is a funny story. Basically, I had no idea how to d design something with *every mechanic* in there (I wanted everything else to lead to this) and wanted to polish more the UI before submission. So, I inputted all previous levels in ChatGPT, and asked it to design something similar with every building type while accounting for my ad-hoc design rules. I ended up refining the result after confirming that it was pass-able. (Actually, I got several designs this way, but this was by far the easiest.)

The overall spike in difficulty, I think, comes from having 5+ mechanics in one stage *and* a large stage. I have the sneaking suspicion that the game needs another 3 stages to gradually lead up to this kind of insanity. I do have a mechanism for hard-controlling difficulty via the chance of spawning the yellow glitches on each stage, but I'd prefer not to mess that and leave the very last stage as very difficult (as a kind of skill test).

Thanks for playing and the feedback! I'm very happy with your description, because this is what I was going for. :-P

The mouse was supposed to be held in the general direction in which you want to go, which I liked because it made things even more chaotic, but after all the feedback I guess it was too much. I DO have arrow controls but had no time to basically think how to say this to the player (low rez...) and I forgot to add the WASD key listeners. Will definitely add these after the jam.

Maybe I will make some kind of intro screen at each stage with the mechanic being introduced or some tip.

Like the other commenters, I was also not sure what the goal was, but the atmosphere was amazing and I would be really interested in playing an improved version! 

As an aside, maybe consider making the character contrast the background more (e.g., I think being all-black when in front of the light would look amazing). I think this is the greatest struggle in this jam: making sure that players can follow both the objective and their tiny character.

Thanks a lot for the feedback! 

My bad: I have keyboard arrow controls implemented (I just don't know how to give the instruction alongside the mouse in the low rez) and just forgot to also add WASD... I will update it after the jam ends, but you can use the arrows until then. I hope they are an acceptable substitute.

I am very happy that you liked all the parts that felt tricky to design/balance. :-) Thanks a lot for playing till the end!

I had a lot of fun with this, and the mechanics were cool, but all the while I was longing for some kind of end-goal (e.g., a timer with a highscore similar to old arcades).

P.S. If you are looking for ideas to improve the game further after the jam, I was expecting a couple of tanks to appear and start shooting at me - they can just damage the biomass and clones to not add another bar.

This game concept is really cool and unique!

At least I hadn't encounted something similar before. The art was also nice and funny. My only real feedback is to increase the contrast against the background a bit for us with bad eyesight.

 If you keep improving it, I would be very interested in seeing a full game, even with the mechanics as are - albeit maybe with a bit more balancing.

In terms of balancing, I must admit that it was too hard for me despite repetitive attempts: it seems that I was always on the negative resources to stay alive and thus couldn't go past the 5th slime. But maybe I wasn't understanding what I was supposed to do correctly - a short youtube video in the game page would probably help a lot.

Thanks a lot for the comments and feedback! :-)

It's a relief about the art style, because this is my first time drawing things myself (took the jam's opportunity to jump into pixelart).

I was trying to pace the first stages (and the first moments of gameplay) to give the player time to explore and learn each effect, but I guess random glitch appearances plus going full-on textless was too much... Will probably make changes after the jam to help with this.

Cool feeling. I think this merits completion.

Great game! Choreography was solid and I quickly got an intuitive hang of moves. 

The stop-motion with explanation of the moves was great too, though I think at that particular instance the game gets done dirty by the resolution constraint/font, which makes the explanations hard to read.

Not criticism for the game itself: I would have preferred if the browser window dimensions were a little smaller so that the whole window fit in my screen (you can adjust them by editing the game page I think).

This is stupid fun to play!

I like a lot of things, so I'll just list them:
- Minimal learning curve (aka, I did not need to spend needless brain effort to have a great time, but still had meaningful decisions to make).
- You get thrown into the fun immediately.
- There is a persistent sense of progress despite the randomized intermediate upgrades - I presume that these get lost, though I did not pay enough attention to tell for sure. 
- Seeing new (and scarier) enemies the more I progressed was great and kind of mind-blowing (just when I thought I was comfortable with which scary things would appear and how to handle them, new ones kept popping up).
- Props for the weapons being different for different difficulties - this was a great way to control the experience without making us feel stupider for trying the "easier" ones. For example, after I realised a katana was too much for me from the get-go, I switched to a gun which was still hard at first but satisfactory because I really liked how it plays out. You basically let me control the difficult-vs-coolness factor to what I was comfortable with, which was great.

Only recomendation is to maybe not make the chips and health bars continuous, e.g., split into rectangural blocks or icons to help understand what they are from the get-go.

Great musing and sfx, and a relaxing color palette.

In my opinion, the kayak was a little too large for the screen in this resolution and the turning camera messes with my eyes a little. But these were not true shortcomings for me personally, because they created to a disorientation very similar to sailing on open sea; they just improved my immersion. :-)

I would have appreciated it if there was some practice or tutorial area at the beginning to get used to the controls.

Nice and fun game! Becomes more and more interesting as you progress more. I eventually gave up at the stage after the ice after the fourth time restarting. 

Maybe a counter of how many retries are left would be helpful. I was also expecting the mouse drag to be in the same direction as the one I wanted to move to (not like a sling), but quickly got the hang of it. It was very convenient that I could "center" the sling anywhere by just dragging from that point.

The combination of nice art and relaxing sound helped me calm down from a hectic day. Huge thumbs up for the esthetics!

Some feedback on the coins, because it was really interesting searching for more:
- In my second playthrough I think I missed a coin at the last stage but could not go back and was stuck.
- Maybe have a final flag to end each level and just count total found coins as a score.

You can report bugs here.

Overall good game. My beginner nitpicks: controls are a bit unintuitive (at least moving the mouse around should be able to change the camera angle? and I seem to not be able to attack while moving) and menu screens feel extremely rough. Lots of fun nevertheless. Thank you!

I think it would feel more natural if things like the drill (and maybe driving vehicles) consumed suit energy too. It would give suit energy a more active role too.

P.S. I like the recent changes.

I love this game! It's easy to get started and makes for interesting playthroughs.

My own five cents on what I would further like to see;

1. As mentioned before, crafting a compass that shows towards the base (or smth) would be nice.

2. I, too, support the opinion for longer day/night cycles (with the same hunger speed reduction).

3. I think vehicle controls are too hard; maybe just move like the character? (I end up not crafting a vehicle) A flying vehicle that would ignore craters (but be either super-hard to craft and/or a bit slower) would also be nice.

4. I would prefer if the base was somewhat more important. I think that being able to create more special modules that require entering it to operate would be more engaging (e.g. a high-tech room to craft things like wires, electronics and solar panels instead of these being on the starting workbench).

5. Brainstorming on water (i.e. ignorable rant) ; it could be a vehicle fuel, a lesser way to restore hunger (hey, water has some nutrients) or a way to recover against random fires breaking out inside base modules. I really like the current usage of it being distilled to produce "emergency oxygen".

Manios

Hello everyone!

We released a new version of SPirateS (download here) with improved textures and lighting. A detailed revision of changes can be found in our change log. As always, we would welcome any feedback.

Thanks for your time!

About Quest of Magic

Quest of Magic is a 2D side-scrolling action game with RPG elements. You select a starting race (e.g. Human, Dwarf, Durian) and an available preset for it (e.g. Warrior, Mage) and jump into in an action side-scrolling platformer.

While playing, you collect items and grind experience, making your character stronger.

About this DevLog

This DevLog is meant to outline the progress of the game's development, presenting my thoughts, decisions and issues during each step. I originally uploaded the game when the Beta phase started, so everything prior to this is mostly for the sake of completeness.

Inspiration

I've always wanted to make a fantasy game where magic and crafting are full of possibilities. I have occasionally toyed with various ideas, such as having various elements that interact and combine with each other to generate multiple effects. However, most such paths lead to overly complex systems that are difficult to easily get the hang of. I wanted something much more easy to understand but limitless in its possibilities.

After painstacking thought and a lot of trial and error, I arrived at the idea of having few magic elements with unique properties that imbue those properties in the spell being casted. My vision was for the player to add elements to a spell, each contributing to a different factor. After careful consideration, I arrived at the following basic spell properties;

• movement
• duration
• damage (including things like ongoing damage)

Conveniently enough, those basic properties can easily be distributed to basic elements; Air can obviously produce spell movement, Water can be attributed as extending spell duration, while Fire usually deals massive damage. Admittedly, there is not place for Earth in this list and this just rubs me the wrong way, but I could not come up with anything else that would meaningfully interact with a 2D environment. I also decided to correlate spell area with spell duration and have the spell diminish (in size) as it deals damage.

After roughly outlining the above system, I realized that I also wanted spells to interact with each other; particularly opposing spells. In the end, I settled towards clashing spells diminishing each other, thus making high-duration elements (such as Water) a form of counter-magic.

With this starting aspirations I dived into the first cycle of development.

Alpha Development

I chose to develop Quest of Magic in Java, mostly because it's the easiest language to debug (raising a detailed exception trace without explicitly using a debugger is a huge advantage), the scope was light enough and the engine simple enough to develop from scratch.

I started development in 2014. In the first prototype, my main emphasis was put towards creating a coherent physics engine that seems to produce the envisioned magic and item interactions. The art was exceedingly horrible and characters could only cast spells.

In later prototypes, I also introduced a simplified way to use items, as spawnable projectiles. I decided to go for item durability and break rate and make items of the same material repair each other. Then I noticed that items worked surprisingly similarly to spells (i.e. had movement, duration, damage/defense components) and thus decided to implement a crafting system that could bind spells on items. This quickly resulted to overpowering items, making me introduce a break rate increase through crafting.

Having mostly completed the crafting system, I then decided on a semi-random terrain generation algorithm. In earlier games I had developed, I opted to go for a fully-random approach, resulting to interesting terrains but with a repeatable feel. Here, I wanted to try something different, so I made a generator that randomly selects chunks among a predetermined set. This seemed to work reasonably well, so I stuck with it.

Multi-Threaded

Nearing the end of this first development period, I realized that my (decent for the time) computer had trouble keeping up with the physics engine and decided to make processing multi-threaded. This naturally resulted to all hell breaking lose, as multiple threads competing with the same terrain objects was frequent enough. Not wanting to make multiple locks that would slow down the system and gobble-up more memory (it did not suffice to just make all functions synchronized), I opted to have a different process function for terrain objects that would run in parallel difficult calculations (mostly AI decisions) and another function to be called after joining the threads to apply those calculations (e.g. make the AI decisions happen). This mechanism worked well in the end. I don't know how game engines usually handle multi-threading, but I presume they employ a similar method.

Karma Mechanic

As I was repeatedly testing the game, I realized that it was tempting to just have a bunch of high-level saves and switch between them each time I opened the game. However, this was not the experience I wanted to present. I wanted players to stick mostly with a single character they had groomed. Furthermore, the ability to select among so many races and presets when starting a new game seemed to be tiring and detrimental to the experience.

Searching for some sort of cost for loading high-level characters, I initially toyed with requiring some amount of money, but this just didn't feel very intuitive. It was then that I was inspired for the Karma mechanic.

Karma would be needed to load high-level previous saves and would be hard to come by (it would naturally accumulate while playing though). This approach solved the multiple-save problem. Furthermore, I could also lock components out of the game, requiring Karma to unlock. This way, fewer but more meaningful choices are presented to the novice player, while still retaining all possibilities. In addition, I also made most merchants unlockable with Karma, so that grinding would have to also aim towards karma instead of just money. Finally, as now situations developed with a lot of unloadable high-;level saves, I also introduced the possibility of trading high-level saves with Karma. As a last touch on the mechanic, I also allowed for some items to have Karma requirements in their usage and introducedRagnarock, a sword that kills almost enything in one hit but depletes one Karma to use.

Conviction

At this point, I was creating presets for various races and realized that, although I wanted to create a playable healer class, I had no way for them to defeat the enemy, unless they were undead. Hence, I introduced the concept of losing conviction if healed enough. This made the healer the bane of fighter classes, as I decided to base the loss of conviction and resistance to it on max magic.

Finishing Alpha Development

After the above first development period that lasted half a year, I was satisfied with the learning experience and tossed the project aside as a partially finished idea that needed a lot of polish before completion.

I came across Quest of Magic again while digging through some backups during the summer of 2016 and decided to further develop and polish it. Indeed, with some aesthetic improvements, such as better animations (thanks to Pivot) and replacing programmer stubs with something less representative of chaos theory, I was actually satisfied with the general look and feel. Furthermore I got to implement the item I always aspired to find in a game; a Blanket that is good against Ghosts!

After also strengthening dark magic influences with the ability to destroy graves with Necrotic damage to produce undead and the Ghost Caller item, I deemed the project suitable for a serious release, hopefully gathering feedback as it progresses.

Beta Development

So, here we are! I will further add to this blog post as the game nears its completion.

Hello guys!

I want to present this game I'm developing called Quest of Magic.

Quest of Magic

Quest of Magic (QoM for short) is a 2D side-scrolling action game with RPG elements. You select a starting race (e.g. Human, Dwarf, Durian) and an available preset for it (e.g. Warrior, Mage) and jump into in an infinite side-scrolling action platformer. In the first time, you can only play with Human presets, but as the game progresses you obtain Karma, which can be used to unlock other races and game features. (You can even delete high-level saves to obtain more Karma.)

The game features a dynamic magic and crafting system.

Feedback

The game is still in Beta development, lacking a bit in content (terrain does not vary enough and the basic storytelling is insufficient both in context and feel). I would really appreciate feedback regarding the game, bug reports or simply cool content requests.

Download

You can download Quest of Magic (Beta) here.

Thanks for your time!