Please post your feedback under this topic! Thank you to anyone who tries the game, and even more thanks to anyone with feedback!
Make a living by creating new objects from the shadows of materials and selling them. · By
I successfully crafted a D-Tier Longsword!!
I think you have some great ideas on your hands; the drawing is fun and I like the vibe of just walking around and buying/selling things. It took me a while to figure out how to craft a sword though; I knew what materials to add but didn't realize I had to put them in order them properly. It would also help if there was a button to quickly access recipes in the Manual so I don't have to click through everything.
I would love to see this expanded and would definitely buy this as a fully-realized game!
Thanks so much for playing! Yeah, I had a lot of QoL ideas that I couldn't get ready in time for the jam ending.
I only changed to a recipe-based system a day before the end or so because the previous system felt much worse to play. Otherwise, recipes likely wouldn't have needed a specific order, and I was indeed planning to have a "table of contents" with quick links to chapters and pages in the book as well, so the player wouldn't need to sift through the entire book to view known recipes and materials.
I took a bit too long doing the backgrounds at the start of the jam instead of iterating on my core gameplay mechanic and figuring out how it should work while being fun to play :p at least I've learned that lesson now, haha.
Someday I hope to refine this into a full game, though I'll need to think on how to give the crafting more depth like Potion Craft.
Okay so I gave it my best shot, I read the book multiple times but I could NOT figure out how to make a pickaxe.
The game is very ambitious and I can see a solid foundation for a fantastic crafting/story experience with this game moving around town and seeing the cool characters and the systems in place already really gives me hope that this gets further developed.
I'm just really bummed that the section that is arguable the most important (the crafting recipes) is so unfinished to the point where I can't figure out how to craft stuff. I really wanted to try drawing the stuff out. I hope you work more on it as I'd love to see a more developed game to play around with.
Also my ADHD brain almost completely shut off when you opened the game with like 5 pages of text to read haha, maybe create a smaller to digest tutorial at first or ease players into it with a small quest/goal guide to creating an item. Then refer them to the walls of text once they are hooked and want to know more.
Give me more content I want to play this game!
Thanks a ton for giving it a go and for the proper review!
There's a reason the crafting feels so underdeveloped, haha. After getting my GDD together, I started out with making the pixel art for the game first without really expanding on the mechanics, it ended up taking 'till Monday to start actually coding things and even then I focused on peripheral systems before the core mechanic :p
By the end I realized I really should've stuck with simpler art and iterated on the core gameplay before doing anything else, because the way I implemented the alchemy felt really bad to play IMO, so I switched to recipes last minute even though I wrote the GDD with recipes in mind. At least I learned I gotta plan things out more, actually stick to those plans and iterate core mechanics first through this experience.
I also wanted the drawing to have more depth instead of such rigid form requirements, but then I think I'd need Machine Learning and that's a lot of math I don't understand (yet).
And a more guided "Show, don't tell" tutorial is definitely on the docket, Potion Craft did something like that pretty well imo.
I'm definitely gonna develop this further eventually! Just gotta focus on my driver's license first now, I didn't drive for 2 weeks 'cuz of the jam, haha.