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Up Down Spell's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Style | #716 | 4.022 | 4.022 |
| Overall | #1559 | 3.467 | 3.467 |
| Enjoyment | #1773 | 3.244 | 3.244 |
| Creativity | #3006 | 3.133 | 3.133 |
Ranked from 45 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
How does your game fit the theme?
You can scale your spells upward or downward and change their appareances and effects.
Development Time
96 hours
(Optional) Please credit all assets you've used
See description for full credits.
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Comments
The art is great, but the game could defiantly be improved with some music and sound effects. The different enemy types was cool, they should probably have an interaction with the different types of spells. As is, once I leveled up water to a wave, nothing stood a chance and the rest of the upgrades felt more like collectables. Overall, great game! Hope to see more from you in the future!
Great game ! The art effects and animations are pretty dope, especially for the spells. Keep up the good work :)
The spell effects are super satisfying to use. I got so excited unlocking every scale-up tier of the Earth Arcana! Excellent game feel for sure. The scaled-down spells feel much weaker, though; there doesn't feel like much incentive to use them. Nonetheless, cool concept, and fun game! Also, the art is fantastic. Love the designs of the player character and the enemies!
(Also, looks like there's a bug where the enemies that shoot projectiles hurt other enemies instead of the player)
Thanks for playing and for giving us a feedback ! Yes we are aware of the issues with one enemy, unfortunately we had git merge bugs so I patched it on my version but not on the final build.
I love these types of games and this one is really really cool! I heard this is your first jam and this is awesome! Looking forward to seeing your work in future jams as well! I also love you are shooting fish, it makes me happy
Art and animations are really nice. The way the abilities look is very cool as well. The screen shake really makes the attacks feel powerful.
Music would be nice to have. Maybe the normal attacks (left click) could be automatic. It's a bit unclear that you can hold longer for different attacks, maybe have a progress bar for which attack you can currently perform.
Nice game though, I love Survivor-likes and would definitely play a full game like this :D
I just played it, and I have to say I really like the idea. I am a huge fan of magic spells in games and a vampire survivor game with magical elements would be sick. Also, the fact that the water spell is a fish is just awesome.
Improvements: - sounds obviously, but you are probably aware of that. - a bit more juice, maybe a bit of screenshake when getting damaged (I think you already implemented a short time freeze when getting hit, which is nice).
Also a quick question? Are the different slimes weak against certain spells? E.g., is the red one weak against water?
Besides that, I am really interested to see where you guys take it from here. Good job!
Well done, the game is great and may have a good future. The only issues may be that it's too "classical" before getting your first upgrade wich comes fast but still, and also at the end you end up using only the better spell. For that maybe add enemy types that resists certain spell types could be intresting. Special mention to the graphics. But except that the game's great so well done it's a 5/5 for me :)
Hey! I saw your game on Mark's stream and decided to give it a try myself. First of all, I like your art a lot. Enemies, despite being simple blobs, look all different from each other, the player's character is cute, and animations look impressive.
It took me a while to understand what does "scaling down" or "scaling up" means, I wish there was some indication right after starting to hold LMB / RMB, because it was not really obvious to me until I tried to hold a bit longer and saw the cast animation :)
I wish upgrades picked up automatically. I haven't noticed them at first, and felt that there were not a lot of them at the beginning of the game, so initially the game felt a bit boring to me.
But overall, I enjoyed playing your game. I like that there are a lot of spells, and most of them have different use case. It was really fun! Great work!
Thanks a lot for your feedback !
You have a really neat visual style, I really wish there were some sfx and music to accompany it! I agree with the other commenters that there needs to be more of an indication of where and how to use each spell to its potential. Maybe it would make sense to let the player scale spells at will, and use the upgrades to unlock ways to combine the spells instead? There's some good potential here!
Fantastic art!
Thanks !
Neat take on a top down shooter, with a nice art style. It would be better if the progression system was more rewarding though.
Like the art and presentation!
Hit boxes seemed to do some weird behavior. I didn't quite understand how scaling down or up really helped the situation. Would have been interesting to be able to understand what would be the benefit of using one skill over another (maybe some enemies more vulnerable to one attack versus another).
Nice VS-inspired game, with a cool art style. I loved the animations and particles. Well done!
Art is really good. But the problem is with the power ups, They don't feel rewarding. and some of the enemies are weak on attacking or don't attack at all. The Idea is really Good and with music and bugs fixing will make the game great. over all 12/15, Nice Work
Thanks for the feedback ! Yes we had some issues with the orange slime not dealing damages 😅
Nice preview art and background on the game page!
WARNING : In the rush there was an issue while uploading : There's 2 .exe files in the zip, the correct one is UpDownSpells - GMTK 2024.exe . Sorry for the inconvenience.
i liked this a lot! the art is quite cute, and the spells are all different and really fun to use. some of them took a little long to scale up, but it was really fun regardless.
I really enjoyed the game. At the beginning, I was just screaming and running away trying to scale my first spell -based on the description- but it didn't work. I realized later that I needed to collect the blue crystals xD. I like the witch and the enemies and especially the water element upscaling (I was spamming it and it was soo satisfying). I would've loved to see something to indicate the health and some background music (unless there is music and my pc is playing tricks on me). With that being said, I really enjoyed the game and I'm really impressed by the quality & the art given that you only had 4 days to build it. Good job!
Nice work!
Nice looking little game! The witch is cute and the animation is smooth! Upgrades were maybe a bit too rare to find, would been more interesting if I could have defeated more enemies faster.