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A jam submission

Creatio ex UmbraView game page

Make a living by creating new objects from the shadows of materials and selling them.
Submitted by KlausMerrit — 8 days, 21 hours before the deadline
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Creatio ex Umbra's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Cleverness#2274.5004.500
Theme#2334.0004.000
Playability#2584.0004.000
Artistic Style#4014.0004.000

Ranked from 2 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

Judge feedback

Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.

  • The game feels polished, and there's clearly plenty of room to expand with other areas outside. Good choice of audio via Kenny's assets. A few suggestions: Make the recipes easier to find. Perhaps as a separate, dedicated recipe book on the bookshelf? But with the short timeframe of a game jam, appending them to the end of the manual worked well enough :) ... although I did find myself wanting to reference the known recipes from the shop screen. So perhaps having those permanently available on all screens would be even more useful? When buying items in the shop, I couldn't find a way to cancel just a single item. So for example I dragged 3 different things into the buy section, but then because it costed more than I could afford, I wanted to return the leather back and keep the other 2 items, but I had to instead 'cancel' the whole transaction and start over. It would be nice to be able to 'accept' a quest and have it pinned to the screen (or easily accessible in some other way) so I don't forget what I'm making :) Overall, great job.
  • GDD Pace of the GDD is good. Perhaps ya could included some images for inspirations? Perhaps add more images of the game? Good to included dev timeline. Game Some of the text font may need a redesign since it is hard to read. I think there need to be an tutorial book for alchemy, so I am not guessing. It is hard to see the symbols in the first book for the sword. The game loop feels like unsure of what it should do, so perhaps have an NPC that introducted of how the game should go into its loops.

Did you include your Game Design Document as a Google Drive link?
Yes

Seriously... did you include your Game Design Document?
Yes

Is your game set to Public so we can see it?
Yes

Tell us about your game!
You're an Umbral Alchemist, able to manipulate the shadow essence all things hold and transmute that into items via the Shadow Canvas. Players will need to select the materials they want to use to create something, then draw the shape of the desired object on the canvas. Players will have to sell their items and buy new materials, with the ultimate goal being the creation of a "living shadow" that can create endless essence

Extra Notes
Thank you all for doing what you do, I don't think I would've ever started game development if I didn't get bombarded by your shorts on YT. Here's to many more Jams!

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Comments

Submitted(+1)

Okay so I gave it my best shot, I read the book multiple times but I could NOT figure out how to make a pickaxe.

The game is very ambitious and I can see a solid foundation for a fantastic crafting/story experience with this game moving around town and seeing the cool characters and the systems in place already really gives me hope that this gets further developed.

I'm just really bummed that the section that is arguable the most important (the crafting recipes) is so unfinished to the point where I can't figure out how to craft stuff. I really wanted to try drawing the stuff out. I hope you work more on it as I'd love to see a more developed game to play around with.

Also my ADHD brain almost completely shut off when you opened the game with like 5 pages of text to read haha, maybe create a smaller to digest tutorial at first or ease players into it with a small quest/goal guide to creating an item. Then refer them to the walls of text once they are hooked and want to know more.

Give me more content I want to play this game!

Developer

Thanks for the review! I left my reply on the feedback post!

Submitted(+1)

It looks amazing! It has a lot of potential, keep up the great work! 

Developer(+1)

Thanks! I'd hoped to get a proper prototype done by tomorrow evening, but it'll probably take a few days longer. I heavily underestimated the difficulty of implementing the main mechanic :p

Submitted(+1)

Best of luck ! 

Developer(+1)

Same to you, cheers!

(+1)

I love this style of game, probably a lot of work for a game jam. Very retro, reminds me of AMIGA games

Developer

Thanks! I'm not entirely sure how much work it'll be, but looking at examples of pixel art drawing programs in Godot did make me realize I might've underestimated how difficult it'll be, haha. Luckily I don't need to work or study rn, so almost all my time can go to jamming out!

I didn't actually intend to do a retro look at first, but the palette I ended up using in Aseprite was the NES palette, so together with my fairly basic pixel art skills it ended up looking quite retro indeed :p