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A jam submission

Arcane IncrementalistView game page

Short incremental game of magical summoning
Submitted by Morph — 26 minutes, 11 seconds before the deadline
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Arcane Incrementalist's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
User Interface (UI/UX)#102.8002.800
Overall#142.4002.400
Graphics#142.6002.600
Fun#172.0002.000
Audio#181.0001.000

Ranked from 5 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

DevLog Link
https://deathray.itch.io/arcane-incrementalist/devlog/481637/mobile-friendly-update

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Comments

Submitted (1 edit) (+1)

Honestly I love the idea of this game, but there are a lot of minor issues with the current implementation that really kill the potential fun of it.

The game moves way too slowly, and there's no way to speed it up through manual intervention as far as I could tell. Most incrementals are also clickers and some have management mechanics to give you something to do, but this one you basically sit and wait for the number to hit a threshold, and that takes a long time. This might be because of a bug, which I'll get to in a bit.

I think it doesn't help that you can only have one summon at a time, so you have to build up enough forbidden knowledge to unlock the next to increase your rate, which requires unlocking a bunch of items to hold that knowledge, which altogether makes the beginning of the game feel like a slog.

Sanity doesn't work as described, and feels a bit half-baked. The description makes it sound like there is a chance of losing sanity on each tick and it's higher with stronger summons, but as far as I can tell you just lose sanity by having more forbidden knowledge than you can hold. You can buy items to increase your sanity cap, but there's no way to regain sanity, which I would have liked to have seen (although maybe it makes sense as a hard end condition). If sanity worked as described I'd also really like to see items to decrease your chance of losing sanity.

I didn't try it on mobile, only on desktop, but the UI is really awkward and in a game that's basically all UI, that's a problem. The biggest problem is that it's in this little window that you have to scroll up and down, which is in a page that scrolls up and down. Unfortunately I think this is where the desktop experience was sacrificed for the phone experience, because I can see how this would work on a phone. Even still, I'd have preferred the 3D view and tabs to be fixed in place and only the submenus to be scrollable.

The game is pretty buggy in its current state. The biggest problem is that the tickrate seems to be all over the place. Sometimes the forbidden knowledge rolls in quickly, sometimes it trickles. There are also issues with the UI sometimes not responding to clicks on the buttons, or taking a few seconds for it to register.

While all of these are pretty significant issues for the game, I think most of them could be fixed with only minor changes. Tweak the numbers, maybe add a clicker mechanic, tweak sanity a bit. The biggest challenge is going to be that tickrate issue. Once again, I really do like the concept and the aesthetic of this game- it's got a neat dark fantasy thing going on and the graphics are simple but appealing- and I think it could be a neat little incremental if those crippling issues are worked out.

EDIT: I also do echo the sentiment that I wish this game had background music built in.

Another Gem on this jam, I gave it a decent rating. 

Now let me bring some suggestions to improve the game further :)

1) First of all, [Sanity] status has no effect on the gameplay and no sense in raising its MAX amount. I would like to suggest to make it decrease not by having the maximal Knowledge, but as long as the creature is summoned. With this, more powerful creatures will increase your Knowledge fast, but you should increase the Sanity amount and take the pauses to regenerate Sanity to do not run out of it too fast. 

2) Next, judging from the stated above - zero Sanity would result to Game Over.

3) Increase the Sanity consumption a bit. 1|2|3|5|8|10|12|15 will be perfectly fine - less consumption for starting creatures, more for Cthulhu.

4) Actually, there is no need to increase the max Sanity by +10 when the new Creature is unlocked. Let it stay the same. However, if the increase was intended by game design, raise this amount to +20, because +10 is really low and has no any noticeable effect.

5) Give us a Goal to achieve. An ultimate Grimoire for 150.000 Knowledge, "The Soul of The World" in English, or "Anima Mundi" in Latin language. Purchasing this Book lets us Win the Game.

Submitted(+1)

First thing I noticed is that the devlog link appears to be dead, did you make sure it was set to be published?

Also I'm sad to say this is yet another instance of a genre I'm not that big a fan of, I will say the artwork is definitely good and the tone of the game feels appropriately culty. But I just don't really click with games that require just waiting around for large chunks of time and occasionally clicking a button.

I didn't try it on mobile so I can't speak to how it looks there, but when trying to play this game in fullscreen it awkwardly shoved the cultist and conjured demons together on screen so they were like overlaid.

Also unless I missed something there's no audio.

(+1)

There is a link to the audio playlist in the [INFO] tab, a soundtrack that fits the game fine enough.

However, I can't score that playlist towards the game, because it was not added to the game self. 

Submitted(+1)

Ah I didn't notice that, fair enough, but you're right its not really part of the game itself. It's cool that they added it as a suggestion, but its a bit like if a horror game had a link to the Silent Hill soundtrack on youtube.