itch.io

Neat game

I think the balance could use some tweaking. I just bought turret slots and weapons, and upgrades. I never rotated my ship. I got through without ever feeling in danger and got to a "capped out" state of having every slot being a plasma lance + 1 shield + all upgrades. That is when I would hope the game would throw a final boss fight at me and then declare I win, either that or it needs an infinite progression system. It isn't much fun to wait for the enemies to slowly scale up while sitting on thousands of undependable resources. I got to 13:02 my problem isn't that its an infinite survival game (although I do personally prefer finite end goals), just that I capped out and didn't have much to do like 8 minutes before the end.

All that is to say, the game has a lot of cool elements, but I don't feel like they cohesively fit together into a tight experience yet. But good potential with some tuning.

Nonetheless, an impressive game jam entry.

Played again after the earlier playtest. 

It was already a fun and polished game and I think you have addressed all of my points of criticism. The preview is helpful and there are no levels that feel like difficulty outliers. The last level feels like a finale especially if you try to go for that star (I didn't, but I did beat it). I also enjoyed all the new concepts like trains and ufos.

Great game jam game, a simple concept done well.

Played again after the earlier playtest.
It was already a fun and polished game and I think you have addressed all of my points of criticism. The preview is helpful and there are no levels that feel like difficulty outliers. The last level feels like a finale especially if you try to go for that star (I didn't, but I did beat it). I also enjoyed all the new concepts like trains and ufos.

Great Jam game, a simple concept done well.

Fun game with cohesive gameplay.

I have two issues with the cord mechanic, first it takes my eye off the interesting action and puts it on pulling the cord. Two it hurt my hand doing it repetitively for so long.

I thought the progression was quite nice, although an exciting unique power or two could spice it up.

This game has a ton of puzzles and mechanics.

My nitpick is that the text animation is annoying because the existing words are not stable, making it hard to read until it finishes (unlike an animation that just fades in one word at a time, keeping the existing ones stable).

In terms of the actual gameplay I go to the puzzle where it said "things are going to start getting tricky". Somehow the game just didn't quite click with me enough to make me want to get over that barrier. Maybe too many different mechanics introduced too quickly? I am not in love with having to physically push other planets around, I liked it more when I just needed to figure out where in the finite orbit they should go. Especially because it makes puzzles sometimes require resets.

I don't mean to just complain, its a very impressive game. Maybe it just needs a more dedicated puzzle fan than me.

Pretty polished and seems like it has a lot of content.

But I stumbled into a strong build early and just pushed skip for like 50 rounds. I came into the finals with 4000 points in the bank. So probably some tuning would help. I also would question if carrying points between games makes sense or just causes unneeded snowballing, while potentially draining any drama from games (if you come in with enough points to win already). That made the late game a bit boring for me because I didn't feel like I needed to make any decisions.

I think the problem was the +1 point for player surrounded by players. I just only picked players and was getting like +100 per spin from just that.

Things I noticed on second run

Costs scale over time (But not fast enough, I had a giant amount of money)
New double triangle enemies.
I feel like i got more to the power fantasy of shooting a whole spray of bullets, but IDK if that was new stuff or just better luck

However, I still got to the point of having like 16k I couldn't spend. I feel like the spinner froze and I got locked out of spinning anymore.

Very cute game, I like the art, sound, story, and vibes.

Unfortunately, I think the mechanic of having to go back and spin the power fights against those vibes. It makes the game a bit stressful, especially if you misunderstand something and get locked into an animation. I also felt a bit mislead because the AI said I would have to navigate in the dark if the power went off, which seemed tolerable, but it was actually a reset. The first time I played it wasn't clear to me that opening the first door increased max power from 1 bar to 2.

Regardless, I had a good time with the game overall and once I got a grasp on everything it was fine.

I love the melodrama of the opening.

I tend to play these games without reading the description first because I want to know how well the game teaches me to play. I was able to figure out how to create hurricanes but didn't connect that I had to both pick up the trash and bring it to the dump until I died and read the description.

Even after learning I didn't get too far, upgrades cost quite a bit and getting tossed once can cause a death spiral where you get tossed into a cluster of tornados. Or maybe I am just having a skill issue. 

I do enjoy how weird and surreal the game is. It will probably stick with me more than the average game jam game.

Lots of polish juice and content in this one.
I enjoyed the tutorial bit, although it overstayed its welcome a tiny bit, but it was fun.
I would appreciate the ability to pause.

I can see the design appeal of the bullets that hurt you, but I didn't actually find them fun. With the hectic gameplay it doesn't seem worth it to actually pay attention to the next bullet. I got further and had more fun once I just started ignoring them and just tanking the damage, putting 100% of my attention into aiming and dodging.

https://william-ritson.itch.io/alchemy-isle

Thanks for giving it a try!

A very stylistic entry demonstrating the power of polished simplicity.

I had fun playing. It feels like a distilled survivorslike.
Near the end I had infinite money and couldn't spend it fast enough. The chunkiness of having to spin then click twice was kind of annoying at that point. I don't mind the idea of having to make rapid fire decisions at an increasing rate but some hotkeys or the ability to just grab the upgrade with one click would be nice. Some visual variety for the enemies would also be nice.

A simple concept leads to quite a fun game.
Its pretty challenging somehow I am always looking at the wrong side.
I wish there were a bit more structure rather than just a high score. Maybe like 3 levels of elevating difficulty with another brief like of flavor text between. That might be part personal preference, I engage more with progression than score challenges.

Feels like the utmost distillation of a stealth game. Pretty neat. My main complaint is sometimes it feels like they look over so much that I spend more time waiting than spinning.

Thanks for the feedback!

Multiplayer works when I tested it, so hopefully it works for everyone else as well.

I will make it more obvious that the castle placement locations are intractable.

I definitely think this game needs more tutorialization and plan to add either a dedicated tutorial or a set of contextual popup hints pointing things out to you on your first time. But I think is that its best to get things as intuitive and learnable as possible with good UI/UX/tooltips etc first then add in the heavy handed tutorial elements after. But I think now is the time to start on the more heavy handed teaching.

Its a fun game. I played all the levels.

Some levels you can't see all the way to the end from the start, and there doesn't seem to be any way to preview the level, which feels a bit unfair when I have to decide how much to wind. You could let players pan, give them a minimap, or just tween the camera moving from the goal to the start to give an overview of the level.

Level 20 "The Long Way" was the hardest level by a huge margin. Much harder than the final level. Its difficulty felt a little out of place (or at least, like it should be the last level rather than the second last). I spent a lot of tries on it and eventually trying to wind the same amount with a mouse each time became tedious. It was fine on the other levels but the huge number of repeats and difficult steering got to me.

Please give my entry a try - https://william-ritson.itch.io/alchemy-isle

A nice polished typing game.

The first time I played I definitely missed some mechanics, so I wonder if the explanation page should go before the game play rather than after you lose. But I can see the appeal of throwing the player into the action. But before I saw it I assumed you had to type the last word in the chain, rather than any word, and didn't realize you can get rid of words by making color chains.

I think the use of the limitation might be a little weak. It almost feels like while playing you are destroying the bad thoughts not injecting them. The text outside of the game says I am injecting bad thoughts to control the game but when I play it I type them and the pop like I destroyed them. Combine that with the upbeat music and it feels like a game about overcoming your negative feelings, rather than brainwashing someone.

Overall an enjoyable jam entry.

Fun incremental growth game.

I like how the viruses are cute little guys while the cells look like an animated biology textbook. It works together well to give it personality, but also a realistic vibe.

Some music would be nice but the sound effects were good.

The ending was a bit anti-climactic and it might have been fun to see a cataclysmic failure of the host or fight against an immune system but these are both reasonable limitations for game jam scope.

Overall an enjoyable game jam entry

The characters are cute, I especially like the dark wizards who just shoot people with guns.

I would appreciate some tooltips or UI elements telling me the stat of the units I can build and what the various timers in the UI mean. I did get some impression from gameplay that skeleton = weak tank, imp = weak dps, mage = strong dps, golem =  strong tank. At the start of the game I spammed a lot of skeletons and at the end I spammed a lot of mages.

The music is grating, I turned it off. Its nice you can turn it off, but slightly annoying that opening the menu automatically pauses the sound, which makes it hard to adjust volume properly (in this case it didn't matter because I just wanted it off). The sound effects are much better than the music.

The core gameplay of overwhelming your enemy with units and snowballing more territory into more money is fun. I do think the 5x5 grids slightly overstays its welcome compared to the amount of novel gameplay. But not by too much and I did complete the game.

I restarted at the end to see how different the map would be. I noticed you can get dramatically different numbers of plain fields (the easy area that gives one gold). Given that the only time you are at risk of losing is at the start before you establish a foothold any map with few fields will be a lot more difficult.

Overall a solid game jam entry.

Clever puzzle game with a nice use of the limitation. 

I think the time limit could be a bit more generous and it would be nice if you could go back only one attempt in the 4 puzzle as it starts to get tedious to redo 3 different routes just because you made a mechanical error on the 4th. Unfortunately I hit escape (or something) on the 4 puzzle and the game turned grey and wouldn't let me continue so that as far as I got.

The visuals are functional. They work well from the game and don't take away form its gameplay but don't rise to the level of making me want to play the game because of the visuals.

Overall an excellent jam entry.

Clever puzzle game with a nice use of the limitation. 

I think the time limit could be a bit more generous and it would be nice if you could go back only one attempt in the 4 puzzle as it starts to get tedious to redo 3 different routes just because you made a mechanical error on the 4th. Unfortunately I hit escape (or something) on the 4 puzzle and the game turned grey and wouldn't let me continue so that as far as I got.

The visuals are functional. They work well from the game and don't take away form its gameplay but don't rise to the level of making me want to play the game because of the visuals.

Overall an excellent jam entry.

Thanks for the feedback.

Very Solid

Things I liked

• Graphics are polished.
• Nice style with mostly 2D style in a 3D environment
• Intro is fast paced an easy to follow

Issues I encountered

• Tiny bug but when I put my cursor over the X in the merchant menu it reverted to a regular system cursor
• The text on Mirror Shot was a bit hard to parse

Things I didn't like

• It would be nice if different towers had different art (I know that would bee a lot of extra assets and may be out of scope)
• The amount of inventory management I did was significantly more than the amount of inventory management I would like to do.
• Maybe getting less, but cooler stuff. Eg hammers with much more drastic effects, but less frequent.

I would recommend adding instructions to the game page as it isn't obvious how the game works.

If I understood correctly the idea is to survive a certain amount of time and you can roll which may create more hazards and may create more useful things like health. That idea seems neat and fits the theme of the jam well.

The game has a nice cohesive feel.

As an asset pack addict, its super impressive that you made all the assets yourself.

The biggest issue is that it feels padded out. Given the limited amount of unique content, which is 100% understandable in a game jam, the levels overstay their welcome, lasting too long and becoming boring. I think it would be better served by simply reducing the repetition in each level so they are shorter.

The second main issue is that shields seem too generous. I can AFK in certain parts of the screen and my shield will just block all damage. The regen rate should probably be slower.

But overall, it's a well-done game and captures that arcade feeling.

Good work.

This game has great style and art assets.

The menu is beautiful and nicely animated.

I did run into a few issues. First the player character doesn't always face the right direction. The math for choosing which sprite to use seems a bit off.

Audio wise, I would prefer that the scream be used a bit more sparingly.

The tactical mode required me to read a lot of text to use and seems a bit awkwardly integrated into the rest of the game, which is otherwise intuitive if somewhat repetative.

This is a neat and polished game.

The biggest issue is that unless you maximize the window, the upgrade bar might not show up, which makes it easy to miss out on the mechanic entirely. It might be fixable by messing with the viewport settings in itch.io

Balance wise, bounciness seems like the most dangerous upgrade. I was able to get to the point where all upgrades were fully maxed out without upgrading bounciness once without much trouble. Once I got that first bounce, I was almost immediately deleted.

Good work.

The game has a neat theme and the minigames are fun and thematically neat.

My main criticism is with the UI. The transparency makes it harder to read and doesn't add much IMO. Also while explaining the mechanics for each game once is great, it quickly becomes repetitive. Once a player successfully completes a certain minigame, they shouldn't need it to be explained to them again.

I did run into an audio bug a few times where sound effects got stuck in loops. This occurred first in the leaderboard at the end and occurred in the WebGL build (I have not tried the desktop version)

Thanks for playing! Glad you had fun.

From the feedback I have been getting it definitely sounds like the player needs some more navigation tools for level 2. Also, level 2 might just be a bit too big  and desolate for its own good. 

Things I liked

• Great environment design
• Neat particle effects

Room for improvement

• Gameplay was a bit confusing.
• Once I figured out how it worked, it was a bit tedius to do the same plateforming several times over because I had to die then respawn to progress.

Glad you liked it.

I had to scale the grass a bit oddly to prevent random holes from appearing in it when the player moves. Might be making it look a bit off.

Thanks for playing.

I am planning to add a compass that points the player towards bosses next.

Things I liked

• Good number of platformer mechanics with no bugs I could see.
• Lots of levels.

Opportunities for improvement

• The elevator platforms stand still for too long, which makes them a bit boring to wait for.
• The rules for whether the ghost can go through laser doors seem inconsistent, sometimes it can sometimes it can't

Things I liked

• Art is nice. I especially like the tileset at the beginning of the level.
• Cinematics were cute

Opportunities for improvement

• Had a fair number of bugs.
• Enemy projectiles moved a bit too fast causing frequent deaths
• No checkpoints (might not be needed if the enemies were less murderous).

Things I liked

• Nice fever dream aesthetic
• Gameplay is neat.

Opportunities for improvement

• Shouldn't it be Seppuku not Sudoku? Or is that deliberate and I am just being obtuse?
• Fire guys seem a lot better than exploding guys, even given the higher price.
• It wasn't initially intuitive that I needed to manually control my "tower" guys. Had pop out of the game and read the description.

Things I liked

• Neat visuals from simple meshes
• Gameplay is simple but fun.
• Transitions into ending scene before the gameplay overstays its welcome.

Opportunities for improvement

• Made me a bit dizzy while playing it, might be worse for people prone to simulation sickness.

Things I liked

• Visuals are excellent.
• Feels polished for a jam game, I didn't notice any bugs.
• Overall, very well executed.

Opportunities for improvement

• The difficulty ramps up a bit too slowly.  There were quite a few waves that felt too easy before the challenging ones came.