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Anathema's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Originality | #416 | 3.130 | 4.200 |
| Gameplay | #566 | 2.385 | 3.200 |
| Overall | #573 | 2.634 | 3.533 |
| Presentation | #675 | 2.385 | 3.200 |
Ranked from 5 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
What do you like about your game?
The art! I'm also proud I actually managed to get story content in the build just a couple hours before closing :D
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Comments
This is really interesting nice job
thanks for checking out my game!! :D
Spent a good hour or so messing around and managed to get a good grasp of the regular alchemy but I can't seem to do the [forbidden] stuff- I got what I thought was 1 exsanguina and 2 dyne but it just make a raw energy potion ;;
Love the art and the theme though and the sfx are nice and satisfying. Reminds me a bit of playing Quacks of Quedlington and that helped me to understand what was going on lol. I like that it is pretty vague what you need to do because it works really well with the theme. It does feel like some of the elements like fire are a lot less useful but that is just an interesting balancing factor. Great work overall! I would definitely play a longer version.
I'm getting a cloudflare error when I try to download OTL
oh no D:
I just redownloaded to see if it was borked for some reason but it worked for me. dunno what that's about, sorry!
I'll give it another go maybe try a different browser, if you have like a different place to download or smth I'll try that too I wanna playyyyyy
not sure if im allowed post links like this but here's a mega link to the zip i just redownloaded of the jam build. Thank you for the interest in playing my game ^^
https://mega.nz/file/ZRYjzKwL#KCm9nbjQI1GNMg0RnE-NEfcti39kMQf-KF0hI0vua4g
It’s neat, but I could quite figure it out, forgot what I was supposed to make, burned all my money, and didn’t have enough left for charcoal so I got soft-locked.
Thank you for providing Fast UI animations in the menu though!
RICARDO NOOOOO!!
Just a moment in and I'd already fallen in love with the character art, then you take my love and joy Ricardo from me! Dastardly!
That aside, I really enjoy my time with Anathema, before I knew it an hour had passed and while I was only just grasping anti-elements, how to create them, and their full purpose in composing aberrations, I didn't even need all of that to thoroughly have a good experience. Honestly I could see myself coming back to this on cozy days when I need to unwind after work.
For me, it really is just that much engrossing to imagine running a little alchemy shop with the set-up you have here, balancing energy and making little plans for the order of reactions and crafting potions so as to not lose potency. Forgive my lack of criticism, but sometimes some adulation is all ya need. Thanks for making this game!
no don't apologize, thank you! That's really heartening to hear.
In order to suit the theme most, I leaned more into aberration crafting as the core point, when really the potion crafting is the foundation, and something you need to get decent at to keep the economics rolling to eventually have the resources you need for aberrations. In a future version there may be more reward or narrative focus on keeping your shop running at the same time, but the narrative stuff that is in the game only took shape on the last day really!
And also, those additional plot beats definitely would involve Zombie Ricardo, so take heart in that haha.
Looks awesome, I played around for it a while and I figured out the potion crafting for the most part, still a little foggy on a couple parts (like when exactly a slot or the whole circle gets overloaded) but I feel like that's okay, maybe intentional. Knowing the exact rules would make it feel less "alchemical". And I get the feeling that I'd start to get a sense for it eventually.
I couldn't quite figure out what to do with the inverted elements however, though I don't think that's necessarily a failure of the "experimentation" mechanic, trying random stuff to see what happens is fun. I think the limitation was my access to ingredients.
Experimenting too much results in wasting a lot of ingredients and charcoal, which then results in not having enough money for ingredients the next day. I would spend the first couple days trying to make high-value potions to save up money to buy a bunch of ingredients so I could experiment more. I think that dynamic is actually pretty cool, balancing running your shop with attempting to fulfill this mysterious entities' request for aberrations, but I never seemed to be able to amass enough ingredients or money to experiment as much as I wanted without going broke.
I like that you're in the dark with what you're supposed to do, but I think having more access to ingredients, either cheaper or selling them in larger stacks, would really help encourage players to fool around and figure out the more nuanced parts of the game.
Thank you for playing my game and for the thoughtful feedback!
I think you raise a really good point! And I think respecting the player's need to actually "waste" ingredients in figuring stuff out by being more generous about it is a simple change that would have big positive effects! (Edit: I've just implemented single items in the shop with quantity between 1 and 3 for a small bump in price in the dev build and I think it does in fact make a world of difference, so thank you again!)
Unfortunately I only had a playable build on the second to last day and had no time to get any playtesting feedback. I'd like to prioritize that in future jams but I'm still glad I actually managed to finish one :D :D :D
Anyway, if you liked the game, I will likely update a post-jam version with some bugfixes, more polish, and certain balance changes like this! Stay tuned :3
Also it's not intended to be confusing when things explode--it happens when too much energy is produced (more than 3 in a slot or more than 7 in the center) but with how elements react when you use multiple reagents in the same reaction it can be a bit hard to tell what the end result will be. I had intended to convey that better with vfx particles representing the energy moving from place to place in the circle, but I ran out of time!
Yeah I think VFX could be perfect for this. If elements are reacting poorly like you're saying, you could show some colored particles clashing together before exploding or something.
Also, you obviously do a lot more 2D in UE than I do so you so you may already know this, but I recently learned that right clicking on imported textures and clicking "Apply Sprite 2D settings" or something like that really sharpens them up in unreal. Especially for lower resolution images like pixel art. But this might not even apply here, I just thought I'd mention it because it's something I learned this Jam.
oh yeah that feature is a must-know for 2d games in unreal. i didnt realize it existed until i watched cobra code's fantastic tutorials on the subject.
And yeah, I actually downloaded a plugin to add niagara particle support to widget BPs, but i didn't have time to learn or implement them unfortunately.
I couldn't get the game to scale properly :(
The game is a bit hard to understand ill be honest ! The art looks nice, but I think fiddling a bit more with importing the art into the engine could make the game look stellar !
Some way to speed up dialogue in the intro would be lovely as well !
Thank you for the feedback!
I will definitely admit this game is a bit arcane! Part of that is intentional, but the other part is lack of playtesting. I'll endeavor to make it more understandable in the future, as well as polish up things including the sprites. But I'm glad you like them anyway :3
Unfortunately the scaling thing was something I realized once I actually built the game and surprisingly it's NOT a simple fix for unreal engine games. I found posts on the epic forums complaining about this from 8 years ago! In a post jam version i aim to fix it but I think I will have to resize all the elements in every widget to do so <_<
And ur right, a dialogue speed slider would be clutch. I should have thought of that--it would have been a quick fix!
I'd say that unreal wasn't the best fit for a game like this, in the best of worlds! It probably made everything more complex as it's not really the kind of games that unreal is designed for!
You're spot on about that, lol. For better and worse I like it and it's been my primary engine since I started learning it a few years ago. I plan to make different kinds of games in it. I've steered clear of Unity for Reasons but I may still learn Godot at some point, or make 2D games of this scope in Game Maker instead which I have experience in as well. Notably, this project was also a prototype for a mechanic I plan to add to another game as well, that I'm making in Unreal, which is why I didn't use GM for the jam ^//^;;