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A jam submission

Hexes, please!View game page

Curses, hexes and jinxes abound in this town. Time to get some cred & reputation as a shaman!
Submitted by Dnfrb (@danferb), Mario (@mario400000), RodPuig — 4 hours, 19 minutes before the deadline
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Hexes, please!'s itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Cursed (theme)#74.0004.000
Overall#93.9443.944
Presentation (visuals)#124.1114.111
Concept (gameplay)#203.7223.722

Ranked from 18 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

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Comments

(+2)

Fun game! I included it in my compilation video series of all of the games from the Kenney Jam, if you’d like to take a look. :)

Developer

Woah! Thank you very much! Glad you liked it and showed it to your community, :D!!

Submitted(+2)

May I order one curse to wipe off COVID-19 from Earth?

Since I always like cooking/mixing gameplay, I had fun playing this entry. :D

I agree with most of reviews here: good use of assets, well polished, though it gets a little bit of repetitive after around stage 4. Thumbs up for you guys!

Submitted(+2)

+ Interesting concept and gameplay
+ Liked the variety of different recipes
+ Appreciated that at the early stages there was no timer, to allow the player to familiarise themselves with the mechanics
+ Good use of assets
+ Sounds and music

- I wish I had more time to read some of the recipe descriptions
- Maybe adding keyboard controls either to the selection of the ingredients or the turning of the pages would help the player
- It got a bit repetitive

Submitted(+2)

Good game and lots of fun! There is a few bugs (missing people) but you can still play the game which is great! I like the idea, and the gameplay. Well designed and planned out

Developer(+1)

Thanks for the feedback! Does the bug appear at the end of the queue? Yes, that's it, it's that the last character is inside the house. Sometimes it is a bit confusing. Thanks for playing!

Submitted(+2)

Had a lot of fun. I liked the concept of the “recipe” book and needing to look for the right spell.

Developer

Thanks for playing, we are glad you liked it!

Submitted(+2)

Incredible job, really well polished, had lots of fun playing it!

Developer

Thank you so much!

Submitted(+2)

This was so good! It feels like a full game, which is so incredibly hard to accomplish in such a short time. The sound and music were great, the animations felt good, and the UI did it's job! I really liked the progression of difficulty, but thought maybe the timer was forgiving? By the end of level 4 I think you have a huge line of people and it felt like I was going through the motions of clearing a large queue of folks needing their curses without a lot of challenge. 

Having points given for time left to encourage speed might have been a nice little 'mini' objective while you played through. When I saw the question mark first come up, I thought it meant I had to guess which hex they wanted, and when it failed I was expecting them to go to the back of line where I try and remember what I had tried before and eliminate the possibilities that way. Might have been a neat mechanic if you could build in clues to the characters in some way.

Anyway, great game, 100% the most polished and finished looking one I've seen so far, you've done a great thing here in a short time! Cheers!

Developer

Hi! Thanks for the through review! 
Under what little playtesting we could do, we felt too that it was really forgiving, but we thought that as a proof of concept it could work like this. Some other players and reviewers mentioned mechanics we didn't even think about (like messing with the curses diary, lossing pages, allowing the player to select only a handful of curses to be shown in the diary, etc) but sadly they where a bit out of scope for our team at the time, :D!

A score would have really helped with additional objectives, for sure. At first we wanted to put in a system where the cursed villager would have a description of his problems instead of icons for each hex. There's quite a big space to the left of the hut where the description could have fit and it would have made the process of deciding the cure for them more challenging (and in my honest opinion, more engaging). Issues with how we handled text in our diary made clear that it was a bit difficult to read in most instances and we were missing the chance to use more assets from Kenney's packs... So we went ahead with visual clues instead of descriptions.

Really glad you all enjoyed the game and we appreciate all the feedback we've received, it's amazing <3!
Cheers!

Submitted(+2)

Cool idea. Nice usage of the assets. I really enjoyed it. nice game :)

Developer(+1)

Thank you very much, :D!

Submitted(+2)

nice, similar to my submission too!   it would be interesting to remove the recipe book after awhile, so you have to remember the spells.

Developer(+1)

It does seem similar!! Great minds think alike, hahahaha!

Yeah, we toyed with the idea of screwing with the diary after a couple of levels (staining the book, stripping pages, getting a page stuck so you couldn't scroll to the next one, etc) but we thought it was hard enough... Which clearly isn't the case, XD. We understimated both the time and the ability to remember certain recipes by memory!

Fun fact, initially there was a total of 64 curses, which allowed us to make give more posible combinations for runes as a recipe (and some very dumb curse names, xD). Considering that the player had to move pages by clicking, that we wanted to have as many legible curses in each page as possible and a limited amount of assets for icons we could use (that we could have modified to have more, but time keeps running!), we cut more than half of that list and left it as it stands today...

More feedback to add to our "things to consider for release" list, :D!

Thanks for the kind review, really appreciate all the feedback, :D!
Cheers!

Submitted(+2)

At some places it was a bit hard to read the text and sometimes it felt that it would be comfortable to put spell list closer to the board, but otherwise the graphics were used really well. Multiple different sprite sets combined together very masterfully to create a game that fits the theme perfectly. Gameplay wise it reminded something like a Dota Invoker gameplay or magicka spellcasting, which is kinda nice that you found a way to incorporate it in a singleplayer jam game. I would love to see some keyboard shortcuts being allowed to cast spells, but never the less good job.

Developer

Hi! Thanks for your feedback!

The inspirations were clear it seems, :D! We thought on Magicka and as a player of Dota 2, Invoker inmediately came to mind! Another source of inspiration was "Papers, please!" (hence the name).

Yep, text can be a bit hard to read on the curses diary, maybe some more contrast between background and text could have helped. Finally for the keyboard shortcuts, I vouched for giving both control schemes, but the team decided on a single one to get kind of a sense of urgency, which ultimately failed but for other reasons. More players feel that the game is really lenient with how much time you get for aiding villagers. Time to cure each gets reduced every 2 rounds and first and second level serve kind of as a tutorial with a reaaaaaaaaaally forgiving timeout counter (around 40s or something like that).

Will add the keyboard shortcuts to the list of things to consider if we give the game a second spin, :D!

Thanks again for your thoughtful review and for checking out our game, <3!!
Cheers!

Submitted(+2)

Super polished and I liked the visuals. You definitely put a lot of work into this!

Developer

Thanks for the feedback!

Submitted(+2)

Really well made and polished game! The gameplay is fun and simple, and the visuals and music are pleasant. Good and relaxing little game, reminds me a bit of theme hospital.

Developer

Thank you, we love that you liked it!

Submitted(+2)

Great game! I was impressed by the visuals, and the gameplay was fun! The only issue I had was that there was a long waiting time between rounds of people coming.

Developer

Hey there! Thank you very much for your feedback!!

Not sure what was happening in that round, but I have a feeling our visual feedback could be a bit lacking regarding when the round has truly ended.  Could it be that you're waiting for the timeout of the last villager in the hut? Normal behavior should be, when all the current queue is finished, the next round begins almost instantaneously. The symbol on top of the hut shows what ails the last villager to enter the hut (and the one in need of a cure).

We'll check what is happening regardless and give a reply shortly, :D!
Once again, thank you for playing our game, :D!

Submitted(+1)

Thanks for replying! 

I assume it was the timeout of the last villager in the hut then. Maybe I just didn't understand what was going on. It was just that I couldn't do anything for a bit because no one was in my queue, but a blue timer was there.