Link to your Game Design Doc on Google Drive.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1aRt6QAPEvWlFMq3auoSzcGcIuT3kAx72cPOoGBmrUZ4/edit?usp=sharing

Have you checked that your GDD is publicly accessible ?
yes

Is your game set to public on itch.io so we can see it?
yes

Summarise your game!
"Some Side Effects Included" is a top-down, rpg style game, where you gather debuffs to inflict them on the enemies in the town, while also managing your declining health.

You play as an ex-thief turned lawyer, who is trying to investigate the mysterious happenings of the town graveyard. A mystery that might also lead to some answers of his declining health.

HOW TO PLAY:
You can control the character with
* W A S D
* or the ARROW KEYS
* LEFT MOUSE BUTTON will cast the gust spell to push enemies back.

The state of the game is a bit of walk around and find the story. Follow the paths and you'll find what you need.


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Please explain how your game fits the theme:
This is only my second game I have ever made. I made a game for the pirate gamejam14 last year. I have no prior experience in game making and i've only been using godot since the gamejam14.

The idea behind the game is, you are dying from a magical illness, and years of health potions have made your body resist the effects of the potions.
You know, take a watered down stasis potion that paralyzes just enough of your body to stop the status effects you acquire from affecting you, but that also includes healing.
The idea was that you would manage your health, use the stasis to be able to gather a bunch of debuffs, and then use those debuffs to defeat the mobs. Keeping in mind that if you had too many debuffs on by the time stasis wore off you might die from the hit. So it was balancing the amount and when you took on a debuff or more stasis.

Obviously looking at the game as it is, none of what i said above is well translated. I bit off way more than I could chew, thinking 2 or 3 debuffs would be reasonable. But no one had any kind of tutorials or hints on a buff/debuff system that was a module like I wanted, so I attempted to build my own. And honestly that's all I was able to set up.

So I accept that as a win, as I have wanted to do other games with a status effect system, so i’m glad I understand that better.

I thought I was being clever by trying to combine the two themes that were voted on, but I put too much focus on the side effects part, and without the end boss working, it kind of gets lost in translation.

I am very aware that this is very much a fake game, with just automated cut-scenes, set up. I come from film and TV and this kind of stuff is what we do. Making a bunch of fake stuff that looks like it works.

I came so close to having a version with music and sound effects, but I got an error on upload at like 7:56AM, and scrambled to make sure my last version reattached in time.


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Is there anything you'd like the judges to pay particular attention to?
I would like general feedback as a new game developer.
I would like to say that my request for any feedback at all was lost last year, and I never got to know what I could have improved on, on my previous game.
So I would like to ask that whatever the feedback is, It's important to me that I get a couple notes at least.

The comment i got on my game in the itch page was very nice though, i liked that, so thank you whoever that was.

I will say I come from an entertainment and technical industry, so I would like some genuine feedback. Like should i have focussed on the look of it less? Whats more important for a prototype?

In film, we need to show a client what something could look like, and what the idea of it will be, and not necessarily that it will work. It’s a very fake it till you make it thing, So i packed a lot of faking it into this just to try to get an idea across.

Was I wrong? Is coding or composition more important for this?


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