itch.io

One note relevant to this: would it be acceptable if an online game also featured bots?

Their behavior would of course be extremely basic, they would only serve the purpose of showcasing the game’s features in the absence of other players.

Without bots, even if the jam becomes modestly popular and the voting period is kept short, creators still risk falling into the usual circle with online games: Player A joins -> No one else to right -> Player A leaves -> Player B joins -> …

Thanks a lot for the good feedback, it’s amazing to hear that somebody went into depth to come up with such details!

The thing about not being able to deal enough damage because of how ingredients are distributed is definitely true. I briefly went over it here, how it may also be a good thing to not always have damage available, since if you do it becomes pretty straight-forward to just sit still and kill everything.

I definitely really like your idea about adding a boss/key system. I am only afraid that making it mandatory could soft-lock players since ingredients are finite. I could remove rare recipe drops from chests and make them a guaranteed boss drop to incentivize killing them, but then that would have to stop at level 15. It could also be that 8 ingredients (with 512 combinations) is too much when you can only make 15 potions, could be that the main issues would be automatically fixed if I reduce that, allowing the player to just craft more things at any given time.

There needs to be some more visual feedback when adding ingredients. Consider placing them somehow specially, shrinking them, maybe adding more visual/sound effects when they are added to a pot or pan. Because as it is now the ingredient simply moves to be above the pot and it’s not really intuitively clear that the ingredient was added and not just dropped on the floor.

Good work overall :)

Thank you for the feedback!

The thing with RNG is definitely very true at the moment. I got carried away with adding potions with special effects that I ended up having less than half in the list actually dealing damage. And since loot is uniformly distributed you may very easily end up in situations where you just can’t make anything that can kill things.

On the other hand this is also a good thing, I didn’t want it to be just a “Sit and aim potions at enemies until they’re all dead simulator”. Lacking the means to kill them sometimes forces you to use all the other means you have to avoid them and progress further to look for more chests.

From the gifs it looks very interesting, but did you forget to upload the actual game or am I missing something? :D

Thanks a lot, nice catch!

I pushed a fix now, should be up in a few minutes :)

Looks beautiful, did you make the art yourself or can you share where you found it?

Some comments I would make:

• From the counter you can grab an ingredient with a single press, but from the table you need to hold down the mouse button. It’s not generally good for controls to be inconsistent like this.
• You can only mix an ingredient with a phial by dragging the ingredient onto the phial. Consider allowing the player to drag the phial onto the ingredient too, I subconsciously tried to do this right away and it confused me for a few seconds that it wasn’t working, I thought I they were somehow incompatible.
• Even for a mini-game, it is a bit strange that you can see everything the game has to offer in literally 15 seconds. Even with the content that you do have already there are ways to make it keep the player’s attention for a bit more. For example allowing the mix of more than one ingredient, timed quests, potions taking some time to brew while you have to pay attention to a list of orders with a timer etc etc.

Overall pretty polished work :)

Thanks! (ง ͠° ͟ل͜ ͡°)ง

List of all publicly available resources used in the development of this game.

Tools

• Defold Game Engine
• Paint.NET

Game Assets

• GUI
  • Fantasy GUI
  • Alchemy tools
  • Kenney UI pack RPG extension
• Tiles & Characters
  • 16x16 Dungeon Tileset
  • 16x16 Dungeon Tileset II
  • Rock
• Items
  • Roguelike RPG items
  • 16x16 Pixelart Potions
• Sound
  • 512 Sound Effects (8-bit style)
  • 50 RPG Sound Effects
  • TEMPTATIONS Remake Soundtrack
  • Slime Splash
• Projectiles
  • Water
• Effects
  • Explosions
  • Alchemy circles generator
• Fonts
  • 8 bit wonder
  • Ancient

Open-Source Libraries

• hxdefold
• Defold-Orthographic