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The Alchemist's Apprentice's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Artistic Style | #328 | 4.500 | 4.500 |
| Theme | #653 | 3.000 | 3.000 |
| Cleverness | #678 | 3.500 | 3.500 |
| Playability | #719 | 3.500 | 3.500 |
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 you have is really good and enjoyable, I had a BLAST playing your game and can see the huge potential in the mechanics you set up for it. I honestly think you could take this game beyond this jam and make something awesome! The only things missing jam wise would probably be the shadow theme, as the wand crafting takes care of the alchemy, but the shadows are just ghost enemies, which isn't really a mechanic, more like set dressing. Other than that though you have a solid-enjoyable demo which I highly reccomend working more on!
- I loved the art and what you did with it. You spelled "acquired" as "aquired". I could have overlooked it, but the same spelling mistake showed up every time I picked something up. No points deducted for that though, it happens. However, I did see some shadow/blur effects weren't applied to some of the beginning text (I believe it was right before you picked up your wand). The main issue I had with the game was that the wand wasn't aiming where my mouse was. My character would follow my mouse, but the wand aim would not. Other than that, I thought you had a completely fantastic game. Keep going!
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!
The player is an alchemists apprentice learning to build his own magical wand
The game includes a small dungeon where various essence can be found.
It is a top down shooter ARPG with the gimmic that the weapon can be built using various essence found in the dungeon.
Can you find the OP game crashing combination?
Extra Notes
Runs a lot smoother in a Chromium based browser
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Comments
This game is amazing! I'm impressed by the developer's ability and also creativity to craft this overall well-rounded, well-working little game! Playing it makes me happy.
Thank you for your kind words, Ray. You know you look like an alt account by me, with you only commenting on my games? :D
Jeez! You're right! That's actually very suspicious-looking ^^ But someday, I'll proof I'm not you by submitting my own little games that by far can't keep up with yours - you'll see ^^
You can do it!
The game was great! Neat idea of customising wand build, and I think you've nailed the system. It was easy to understand, not too complicated yet loads of potentials for depth. Nice job on that! I just wish there are a few more levels and enemy types for me to fight with, it just never get bored!
A slight thing about the enemies is that you may want to improve the path finding a bit, the ghost are all stuck and cannot get through the one square pathway, and allows much cheese. But other than that, the game was expertly crafted! A job well done!!
Zelda atmosphere meets Noita mindset!
This is a game that allows you to combine elements with other elements & modifiers for emergent mechanics. The presentation is quite good and I'm impressed by the variety of sprite assets created (by one person) in such a short amount of time.
The ghost enemies are cute, but also quite dumb and do not seem to find pathing around doorways or themselves. If you kite them they will quickly stack up along the walls in the next area you're about to go into and you can pick them off like farm animals walking into the slaughter... Sorry ghosts!
Overall this is still a fairly competent game for the 2 week time allotment that this game jam had.
Good job!
(Also, do try to avoid the truly game-breaking combination below. It froze my game immediately because it was just too strong!!)
[Editing this post because I'm not sure my image is appearing. The combination I put in was as follows:
tri-shot, center, double-shot, spread-shot, ice above & fire below]
Thank you very much for the kind words and for playing. The AI was designed for more open spaces, enemy design overall is a weak point I guess.
So did the combination you found have stability issues, i.e. did you get frame drops or did it just feel unbalanced? I tested many similar combinations and they worked fine for me. I should probably test on weaker hardware as well.
The combination I listed actually froze my game completely as soon as I built it. Not sure why that would occur since I assume you're calling your functions related to the wand set-up later on attack.
No actually I’m kinda “compiling” the code and pre-calculating the result of a cast, so there is likely a bug there, thank you for reporting
This is really good fun. The art style and sounds hit a sweet spot for me that I really enjoyed.
I like the wand configuration mechanic with the different directions.
Really enjoyable!
rated on stream: timestamp
Thanks again for playing. Seeing people play the game is a lot more valuable than just comments.