How far did you get? You start a battle by pressing Z. In the battle you can spawn allies by selecting them using Z and then select the tile to spawn them in the highlighted area on the left. After you spawn allies you can use a spell as long as you have sufficient "mana" on that color. You can also skip your turn using X. Sorry for the lack of a tutorial, I ran out of space on the file. I will try to save more space to include a tutorial.
Viewing post in Beyond Ceres jam comments
It looks like there's an interesting tactics game in there but its very hard to figure out without instructions.
I managed to defeat a few enemies by trial and error without knowing exactly what I was doing. The map changed to another area with new monsters and I stopped playing.
Feedback:
- The visuals look polished and there story seems interesting, but after the fighting starts there doesn't seem to be any plot advancement anymore.
- I didn't know what keys are useable. I found only Z and X and arrow keys
- I didn't know it was turn based, only sometimes the action stops and pressing X seems to advance the action
- I wasn't able to tell how much "currency" I have left to purchase the units
- I didn't know why the screen changes color during battle
- Would be great to start simple and gradually ramp up the difficulty/complexity and introduce abilities step by step
Great effort and very promising game!
Thanks for the feedback!
I ran out of file space and time so the turorial/story got cut in the begining.
The keys are Z/X, yes. I should have put that instead of the (O)/(X) pico-8 buttons in the text.
Yeah I should make more clear when your turn begins/ends. Thanks for pointing that out!
The amount of characters that can battle at once is limited by the amount of collumns in the special ability table. I will remove that limit since it is a bit frustrating and not very intuitive.
The screen darkens when you use a character's special ability.
I wanted to make the complexity ramp up slowly with the tutorial, but I think the main problem is the special abilities system... You have to put a character on the field AND have an amout of that specific "mana" but even then most spells are a bit situational... I'll rework the spell system to only require the mana and not the character. I felt that way testing the game late in the submission time but it was too late to change before the deadline.
I will make some changes later, so if anyone is interested you can check back next week
No worries! Totally understandable, time constraints are hard haha. I ended up understanding the game by reading the guide a few times and your comment, and it's a cool idea, but it seems way too complicated for a jam (without an in-game tutorial that is).
At least in my experience, people tend to play jam games once or twice and if they can't understand it they move to the next one. I'm not sure if we should design based on that (at the end of the day you may want to try a complicated idea in a jam), but I think it's worth taking it into consideration.