itch.io

Thank you so much for playing the game, and especially for the feedback. I actually went ahead and implemented your suggestion about the element combination visual, and it's now in the game. :) https://hexblue.itch.io/hexament/devlog/809273/minor-qol

I'd have to think extensively about the suggestion regarding the Wish Orb element in terms of game balance. I appreciate the suggestion all the same.

See title. :)

Addendum: Can we submit multiple entries?

How would it be received if I were to make a game which held to all the listed technical limitations of the DS, but with some very strange departure (while keeping the feel of the ds?)

An an example, what if I made it such that the player could move around the buttons on the ds, or rotate the top screen 180 degrees such that its top edge was now flush with the bottom screen's top edge?

For me, the DS was such a strange departure from the single-screen meta of handhelds at the time that this strangeness is what defines it more so than its explicit and specific form factor.

Thank you for your time and response.

Thanks for playing. :) I'd have liked to have been able to do more with the tutorial, but ended up prioritizing other things once I got a basic tutorial set up.

Thank you for playing. I'm very proud of my graphic work. :D

Thank you for playing. : ) And yeah, WillyB (our team's composer) does great work. :D

Thank you for taking a look at it! I was worried the first few levels might be too easy, but ended up going with what I did based on user feedback and just watching people play it blind.

I really struggled with the CRT filter, trying different ones. ^^; One of the previous ones I did have a working option to disable it, but I suppose that must have gotten broken in a recent build.

It was fun for sure o/ thanks for letting me mostly focus on graphical assets. It was a fun change of pace for me.

lol np

Getting that legend turned out to be harder than expected, but this wasn’t realized until after the submission deadline.

As for game overs, as I said in the description that is one of the incomplete features.

Thank you for playing the game. :)

Thanks for playing! : )

It is using 2d tiles, lol. It looks 3d because I rendered it in Blender, and exported as flat images from an isometric perspective. :D

That's a fair point.

Thanks for playing! : )

I actually didn't start until Feb 9th I think. Other than a few roadbumps, though, this is the smoothest the development on any game I've made has gone.

Thank you for playing.

There is a tutorial in the game, in the form of the information provided through the character dialogue in the first few floors. This information is also made available within the guide book, accessible at all times.

The guidebook updates with information as it is presented by the character dialogue (or at the start of the next floor if you're faster than they are!)

I'm sure if you take a look, you can do it!

That they do! : ) Have you tried using middle mouse drag?

I appreciate the feedback on the framerate (on, I'm assuming, the web version.) When I do profiling, the overwhelming majority of the time is taken up by the level rendering.

There may be more I can do to streamline that rendering code, but it will require a full rewrite of that rendering code at this point rather than minor optimization. I've already plucked all the low-hanging fruit I could find.

Good news - I was given permission to upload a build where I had resolved some of the framerate issues. (No gameplay/content changes.) Give it a look if you have the time and inclination. : )

Very interesting concept in that you don't control the movement fully, only what kind of movement is occurring. I did get into what I assume was a bugged state where I could slide, but not jump, trapping me in a valley. Camera could be a bit too zoomed in at times.

Overall, fun and interesting. Nice graphics, music, concept, and decent implementation.

The zoom dash was a lot of fun, even if the jumping challenges felt a bit too unforgiving at times. Perhaps checkpoint right before particularly hard jumps would have been an improvement? Very cute overall.

I figured out what Death's Favor measured pretty quickly, but it might have been best to explain it explicitly. I do think Death's Favor was a nice balancing mechanic to prevent the player from simply running away the entire time. 

Things were very well balanced; I was down to about 20% health at 3 minutes, which made for a nicely tense experience. Surprisingly enjoyable given I generally don't go for this game genre.

Having your vision diminish when hiding was an interesting counterbalance to being able to hide.

I like the concept of trying to find a way out of bounds. Using the screen transition to hide a solution was nice as well. Unfortunately, I couldn't find a way past the vertical red pole next to the cliff.

Hey! Thank you for playing. : ) I was allowed to upload a build with some FPS improvements, so if you try it again you may see better framerate.

Thank you for the understanding. I have updated the HTML5 and Windows builds on the game page. This build has no gameplay changes, but drastically improves the fps.

For context, I was previously seeing fps dropping down to 10 by floor 15 (each successive floor is larger than the last, meaning it is more resource intensive.) And that was on the Windows build. The HTML5 build was far worse.

With this build, I still had 60+ fps on floor 15 on the Windows version, and a still-playable 30 fps on floor 25. I haven't been able to do full testing on the fps improvement of the HTML5 build, but I imagine it will benefit from the fixes as well.

My game experiences pretty severe lag, especially the web version. In the FAQ, I see the following:

[What if I don't have enough time to submit or I miss the submission deadline?] 

Don't stress too much, this jam is intended to just be a fun escape or a fun challenge. We can work with those who miss the deadline by a short while but all submissions are due at the due date (February 13th) During the rating period you are able to push game breaking bug fixes but can not add more content until after the week long rating is done. After rating is done you can update it to your hearts content! 

Would it be alright for me to upload a build which helps with the framerate issue but otherwise doesn’t affect gameplay/content? Thank you for your consideration.

Thanks for playing! The first 5-ish levels are designed (to try to force the player to learn the mechanic being taught,) while every level after that is randomly generated. : )

You're definitely right about performance issues. It works better on desktop, I swear! lol (Though the game still starts to lag around floors 10-15 on my machine.)

Nah, the web version is definitely laggy. Seems to run much better in the downloaded version for most people, though! : )

Yeah... not going to spoil the win condition, but the check for it is definitely bugged. ^^; It tends to trigger a little early, but not so early that you miss out on any content I think.

Thank you for the feedback. I haven't had much time to work on the game lately, though I am hoping to return to it when I have time.

I do have the beginnings of a tutorial system set up. I'm hoping to make it a lot easier for the player to learn the early mechanics, as I'd really like for the challenge to be primarily in the later levels when you're having to balance adjusting multiple elements with a limited instruction set.

You're right about your identification of Salt and Earth. I really should include the functionality to display the element names above or below the symbols for convenience of communication.

I'll have to take a look at your game when I have some time. Thank you for the feedback.

What the Game is

Lately I've been working on a game inspired by Zachtronics, a dev which made some of my all time favorite games. (Though the temptation to include some 'discovery' influence from Tunic and Outer Wilds is ever-present.) AlchemArcana is inspired primarily by Opus Magnum and The Forbidden Path. In each level, you are tasked with transforming some input into a specific output via conditional alchemical instructions.

A lot of my dev time thus far has been in setting up the system to handle the various transmutations, and generally making the game pretty. (I can't help it, I like the pretty.) The areas I'm likely to be concentrating on going forward are level design, mechanic tutorials, and some of the basic narrative framework for those levels.

Feedback

While I'm open to any feedback, what I'm seeking most at the moment is to know what things are intuitive and what really needs to be spelled out for the player. Right now there's zero in-game instruction, and that's one of the big things I want to fix currently. But it would probably be good to know what things players have the most trouble with and what is at least semi-intuitive.

I've tried to order the current levels in roughly ascending difficulty.

You can find the game here: https://hexblue.itch.io/alchemarcana Thank you to anyone who takes the time to try it and let me know how your experience went!

That’s the idea! I’ve left plenty of room in the Ui for a menu and narrative box too.

Glad you enjoyed it! You're right about the minigame - it could have used more explanation.

Thank you for playing!

That's understandable - the defrag mechanics got built early, but probably received the least actual dev time of any part of the project. And you didn't miss much; there's only 1 stage.

Thank you for playing though!

Very creative, although the background music made it a bit harder than it would have otherwise been to keep the note patterns in mind.

Love the way it progressively teaches you (and expands on) the unlock mechanic with increasing complexity. It was very clear at each point what 'lesson' I was learning.

Graphics were good and controls felt surprisingly good. Attacking/Comboing felt really nice.

Fun, even if the controls took me a sec to process. I think you might have gone over the 4 color limit due to anti-aliasing. Cool entry though!

The 'crash landing' got a giggle out of me, for sure.

Ah, sorry. We are no longer looking. Thank you for your interest!

Hello! We're a team of 2 (programmer/designer + music/sfx composer) looking for a pixel/sprite artist. We are looking to make a game in the top-down or side view, currently a little undecided between them (So if you're really strong in one or the other, you'll likely push us to pick that one!)

We've got the bones of a game idea at this point which could work in either of those formats, though of course the contest's theme could throw us for a loop. We'll just have to see what it is!

Current Team
Hexblue - Programmer/Designer
WillyB - Music/Sfx Composer

If you're interested, please message me here or via discord (@Hexblue)! Thank you for your time.

Edit: We are no longer looking. Thank you!