itch.io

First off, I must say- great minds think alike! Our entry also utilized a very physics-based approach to the brewing section with specific recipes to follow to produce certain results, and it's a lot of fun to screw around, throwing peppers and other objects all over the place.

One thing that I found quite difficulty to play around however, was the lack of non-physics storage in the game. That is, places to put items that didn't make them pile up and flood the countertop. I quickly found myself having to sort through piles of peppers every time I wanted to brew something, and the money adding on definitely didn't help, and I never found myself needing to spend it because I was able to simply grow the secondary and tertiary peppers instead of cross-breeding. My one recommendation in that regard would be to make money be more of a UI element where it just subtracts from it when you make purchases, and make some kind of storage system that is independent of the physics system (look at how our ingredients were stored for reference)

I absolutely loved the bit of humor in the letters you would receive, like how the organization got extra adjectives added to its name every time, but they too I wish could be stored/trashed without relying on a secret mechanic (which I actually found out about while writing this. I saw the letter that hinted at burning them and even tried the candles during day, but had entirely not noticed they became lit at night, even if it makes sense in hindsight). The sound effects and music were also very well done.

Other things that could be done just as a quality of life thing would be to make it possible to "bookmark" a recipe so that it can be viewed without opening the book again, as I found myself reopening it every couple peppers to ensure I had the steps in the correct order (although this wasn't an issue for yours as an incorrect potion would just spit the ingredients back out. Although, the problem WAS exaggerated when my items started to pile up too much, causing ejected items to fall back into the cauldron immediately), and allow players to skip to any point in the day by clicking that point specifically. I found the game would lag greatly to the point of freezing if I tried to spam click the calendar, so waiting it out and then clicking again got tedious after a bit.

All said, I'd honestly call it a solid 9/10 game! Only quality of life issues to account for, but a really good entry.

Thanks for the review! Yeah, unfortunately I didn't have time for the tutorial until the last second due to losing a bunch of time on transcribing recipes from the book to another internal data structure, so making it caused a LARGE array of problems at the last second, including never officially "ending".

As for the cauldron potion dunking, that's more an issue of the web browser acting as if it's tabbed out when you drag the cursor off the window canvas (which I didn't realize until it was too late to fix, as I was playing in whatever specific set of circumstances it worked in, which is why I HOPED the maximized window thing was a guaranteed fix for it, but it was really inconsistent, maybe it depends on the specific browser or monitor resolution?), but luckily this issue would be entirely absent on a proper Windows build, even IF we didn't have a better idea in mind for filling potions already.

As for the rest, we will definitely be altering the camera, either making it slower and less of a border while holding items, or making it more like a "hover button", where it instantly slides to one of the stations when you move over it, but doesn't keep moving. We planned to have a stirring sound, but our sound designer was only available for the last 5 days of the jam, with the last of those days stolen by an internet outage, so I'm grateful we got what we did tbh.

Also, the recipe book DOES actually have tooltip images when hovering over ingredient names (but honestly, I should just have them always print instead). I THOUGHT I explained it in the tutorial, but maybe I'm mistaken, or just didn't explain it well enough.

Either way- we're glad you were able to enjoy the parts of it that WERE functional, and we definitely plan to continue with it! We have lots of great ideas for ways to expand on both sections and even connect them a little more than they already are!

haha I've heard that so many times. I'll probably work on the reload times after the jam, but I personally never found much of an issue with them because the first character has time slow, the second has two guns, and the third has half the reload time of the others. I even got to round 102 on sheriff. But thanks!

It was a bottle, but that's what I get for making the sprite instead of leaving it to my dedicated artist haha! Glad you liked it, I've heard a few people say they liked that character the most now, so I might consider rebalancing the others (even though I do the best using the first character with the time slow haha)

thanks for the feedback. I actually did find that some of those things made it difficult, but I was able to work around most of them with some strategic playing, and me and a couple others got past wave 50 on all characters, and I got past wave 100 with the first character. I think it's definitely hard to do given what you said, but certainly possible with practice, much like anything.

Thank you! Believe it or not, the western style was actually planned even before the jam theme was announced, and we liked the idea so much that we just hoped that whatever the theme turned out to be, it wouldn't mess it up!

thanks!

thanks! My favorite to use is the Sheriff (time slow guy), I even made it to wave 97 with him, but I've heard a few people say they especially enjoyed the Bartender. 

Nice job! From the pictures I was thinking "This kind of looks like Limbo if the boy was on fire", but the gameplay is very different. I didn't realize on my first attempt that I was supposed to shoot back, but after I saw the shop upgrades I tried clicking and figured it out.

That looks amazing! I like the idea of making controls a little more complex than move and shoot. Using the opening system diagnostics was a good way to show the relevance behind each of the controls, like the mirror-reflecting shield.

It's a pretty good idea, but the player moves a bit too fast in my opinion. I like the retro art style (wink wink, I'm definitely not biased). Good job!

Good job! The graphics are great, the sound is great and the usage of limited-time events like the chest was a good idea! I only wish there was more to do with the coins- unless I just didn't get far enough to use them.

Thanks! Yeah, the animations weren't perfectly fluid, but we plan to upgrade all the graphics in a full release in the future

Thanks! That was the original intent for the how to play section, but we ran out of time between going to school and all the fixes we needed to make. We were up at 1AM on a school night making last minute sound effects, voice recordings, and item spawners the night before the jam ended.

Thank you very much! I was thinking of adding a map, but I would need to think of how to do it based on how I coded the map to work (since the rooms themselves don't change positions, but rather the doors between them randomized). Hopefully you didn't have too much trouble with the game, since I discovered about 10 minutes after the deadline that there was a game-crashing bug and an issue that caused it to frame-drop in some rooms after about 10 minutes of playing on a single attempt.