itch.io

Very fun.  After a few runs, you accumulate tricks and techniques for manipulating the die, and then when at some point it all 'clicks' and you get these intuitive shape-rotator moments that feel really good.
I don't care much for the anime aesthetic, but that's a personal taste thing.  I like the look of the board and UI and all that.

More magics are in the works, including things that aren't directly burning everything to a crisp and some that are burning things to a crisp *but different*!

(YOU'LL HEAR THE NOISE AND LIKE IT)

Thanks for playing!

Burning down your house is an important introduction ritual!

I plan to totally replace/redo the player character model, yeah- he needs a proper spiky hat.

The blue lightcubes looking that shitty are an artifact of the current light system - I'm working on improving that, it should be better next DD.

Yeah, the music is generated - in the long run, I plan for it to react and shift based on where you are and what's happening, that should stop it being repetitive.

For fire - the game needs some tutorials I think, or maybe more puzzles will help with that - the idea I was experimenting with is that you shouldn't be able to just nuke enemies from a screen away, you have to make fire dangerously close to yourself and blow it at distant enemies to flambé them.  I'm going to keep experimenting with this, and there'll be more varied kinds of magic/actions you can take in the game.

Candle-based fire puzzles are in the works, and yeah - there's a lot more Stuff to come!

Thanks for playing!

The wind thing at the edge of the map is a bug and will be fixed next DD, and the character collisions with the edge of the water suck ATM - I'll work on those too!

I'm glad the room torching feels good! I'm looking to add more things that interact with wind next, projectiles and puzzles and so on, including more kinds of magic (force fields, stonebending/making walls of earth, laser beams), and a more in-depth magic system. 

Thanks for the review!

I'm absolutely aiming for the noita-ish physics-world interactions!  Especially objects being moved by the air, and moving the air in turn...

Yeah, more interesting enemies enemies, projectiles that are influenced by the air, sound effects, and better feel in general are all on the list of things to do.

I am glad the music is memorable.  (I'll add a volume menu).  A fun fact about the music is that it's generated by this function:

Hence the schizocore.

The framerate's capped, yeah - I haven't uncapped it / disconnected logic frames from rendering frames yet because a lot of game-relevant computation is happening on the GPU and a lot of data is going from the GPU to the CPU - it's complicated.  It's something I'd like to fix if I can without making the performance very unpredictable.

Thanks for playing!

The flame you add to the world is bigger when you add it right near you and smaller if you add it far away.  Also, grass can catch on fire and burn which makes for much more fire!  So if there's nothing to burn, and you're adding flame far away, all you'll get is a tiny flame.

Sorry, there's no respawn button in this version, you just have to close and restart the game!

Thanks for playing!

Yeah, I'm enginedevving for bigger worlds right now and once I have that working it's content pump time.

The texture is intended!  The wind isn't, though, I fucked that up. The edges of the map are meant to be 'read-only', but it looks like I accidentally made them writeable, so you can cause ongoing winds at the edges of the map...

Thank for playing!

I'm glad the fire/air movement comes across well :)

Yeah, I pumped up the flammability of the grass for the demo.  I want to add a) more dangerous enemies and b) spells/abilities that are a bit less likely to destroy you - laser beams/lightning that can catch things on fire, but not necessarily near you, physical projectiles...  
Longer-lasting spells to protect yourself from the consequences of your actions are in the cards too, so that you can be running around in fire (for as long as your mana lasts!).
Thanks for playing!

Another wizard enjoyer!

The game feels good.  I agree with others about the late-game spawns being  too close to the player.

Also, I got pretty far using the fire-light spell (everburn?) and eventually there was a large lag spike whenever enemies spawned in.

The spells themselves are neat, but as others have said at present there's not much incentive to switch.  More enemies with elemental variants could obviously force the player to switch around, although I've always found the standard 'array of elemental resistance %es" a bit boring...  One thing I couldn't tell was whether spells interacted with *each other* meaningfully.  Like, what would get me to switch between spells would be sick combos of different spells together, but because of the casting time I don't think this actually works at present. In principle, everburn and entangle have synergy, but in practice I feel like right now I'm better off just casting everburn twice.

I look forward to seeing later versions of this! 

PLEASE READ THE INSTRUCTIONS/TUTORIAL BELOW!

Fling Fire and Wield Wind!

You are a Wizard, on holiday in your delightful shack.  But you hear something grinding and crawling in the nearby caves.  Go in there and burn everything to death so you can enjoy the beach in peace.

----

RIGHT CLICK conjures fire.  Fire burns things and causes light.

If you conjure near yourself, the fire you conjure will be much more powerful! 

If you conjure fire further than an arm's reach from yourself, you will only manage a pitiful flame, fit only for lighting candles and giving dim light (or really pathetic damage).

LEFT CLICK and DRAG stirs the wind.

WASD to move, ESC to quit the game.

Fire is moved by the wind; you can conjure fire while blowing it.

Grass can burn. This can be both good and bad for you.

You can burn. This is mostly bad.

You can light candles on the floor, but watch out- you can blow them out, too...

(This version of the game is certified 100% functional!  By which I mean it runs on my machines.  If it breaks (like it did catastrophically last DD) please tell me.)

Thanks for playing, and for the feedback!

The physics grass is long due a visual upgrade :)

Yeah, the chain is experimental.  I have plans to ameliorate the wall issue.  You're right about the motivation behind it; the physicality of the chain also allows for some interesting techniques - for example, if you hold left click in the distance while out of casting mode, and then activate casting mode, the chain's quick movement while spawning will blow a powerful gust of wind in a line from yourself to your mouse cursor, which you can use to blast enemies or accelerate yourself.  I'm not sure whether I'll keep it, but if I do, it needs to be less janky.

Thanks for the bug reports.  Turns out that mass spawn bug happens if the upgrade dialogue triggers on the same frame that the enemy spawning ticks.  Just a stupid mistake on my part!

Yeah, the red gobbos are maybe too fast - you *can* outpace them by blowing yourself along on the wind, or blowing them away, but I'm aware this capability isn't really signposted, and without it they're pretty intractable.  Probably enemies should ramp up in speed more gently.  The next DD needs a better tutorial, a proper UI system, and generally better robustness.

Thanks again for the helpful comment!

Thanks for playing!

Yeah, I wanted to build a vertical slice of what a longer game's combat evolution might look like, as a test bench for seeing how fluid-dynamics combat would work.
Glad the technical underside seems better (although it has a long way to go!)

Yes, the wind can blow the fire; from watching people play, it seems like the perspective makes it hard to see which part of the fire is the base and which is the higher-up parts - 'grabbing' the base with the wind works better, grabbing the higher-up bits is less effective (because it's further from the ground/less hot).  I plan to have the camera change angle when you activate casting mode to help mitigate this, as well as better differentiating fire that's just high up in the air.

Yeah, the player is a bit slow.  It was too fast before the DD, and I overcorrected... 
(If you're still playing, could you please press F3 and then 'K' at some point?  I'd  be interested to see whether you've got 60FPS or not)

Thanks for playing,  and thanks for the feedback!

You're a wizard, but all your magic is just messing with the world's fluid mechanics simulation, and you burn as easily as anything else!
This is a combat demo!  Try to survive and kill as many of your fellow goblins as possible.

Press 'space' to toggle casting mode.  You're able to cast magic when you see the blue magical tentacle: this is how you impose your will on the world.  Your tentacle is, unfortunately, short, and so you can't do magic too far away from yourself... 
While casting, use left click and drag to drag the wind, and right click to add fire into the world.  Creating fire is very expensive!  Get some mana regen upgrades or use the environment to your advantage.  I hear grass burns...

This is pretty early in development.  (Audio is missing in this release!) If you have any technical difficulties, or the game just doesn't run well, please let me know!

Good central gameplay concept, a lot more fun than I expected from the itch page.   Only played up until the ladder level (which I liked a lot!)  
The game is visually emulating the style of old platformers, but it clearly isn't one, technically speaking.  This means that some 'glitches' feel more contrived than others.

The most fun glitches were the very physical ones, that had to do with multiple systems in the world interacting.  My favourites were spamming e while holding a box to shift yourself backwards, and jump+e while on box to get high up with the box in hand.  These glitches felt like the natural outcome of poorly-thought out, but fundamentally simple programming.  I've written games with glitches like these!  The first ladder glitch felt good, too.

The glitches that emulated old games felt weaker to me, specifically the one about limited numbers of sprites being able to be drawn on the screen.  It's fake: the game box physics 'really' behave the way they do, but this behaviour is scripted.  In old engines, you got that sort of visual glitching because the game was fundamentally low-level and you were reading memory at an offset you weren't meant to.  Here, the glitching is a sprite drawn in an editor!  Because it's 'fake', this glitch can't combine with any other puzzle mechanics (which is presumably why it only exists for one level, then is removed).

In this game, you have the player controlling the princess, and the narrative figure of the dev embodied in-game, trying to fix bugs as she uses them to bypass obstacles.  But there's a hidden, 3rd character:  the real-life Dev, responsible for the bugs.  
The game presents a fiction that it's an old, 16-bit game or whatever, but it clearly isn't.  The sprites move freely
Some of the bugs really feel like they were added by ingamedev.   They feel like a naturalistic part of the game world (that is, the fictional game we're meant to be controlling a character inside of).  The sprite bug doesn't.  It was clearly added in by RealLifeDev, and I think it weakens the game mechanically and thematically, because once I saw it I started second-guessing whether any later puzzle would have an answer that lay within the pre-existing physics of the game world or whether it would be some scripted reference to old game engine limitations (that this game does not have!) that I'd just have to guess. 
If the author had actually made the game 8-bit and actually used sprite slots, that puzzle could have been good - because you'd have been able to integrate it with the rest of the game!
But as it is now, I don't think it fits with the puzzles involving block glitches (which are great).
The other glitches fell inbetween the box glitches and the sprite vanishing for me in terms of how much I liked them.

I like a lot of things about the game.  A game about glitches in the game itself could be really great, and I see fragments of that greatness shining through here.  I hope the author makes a version 2, or in general keeps making games and gets great at it!

Thanks for the video!  It's very useful to see exactly how a player interacts with things.  I'm glad the fire/air is cathartic to mess around with (I still find it fun to just swirl the air around, and I've been staring at this thing every day for months...!)

I'll try and flesh out the experience/puzzling more for the next DD :)

(Yeah, the map is limited in size, and I just draw the edges endlessly out to infinity....  Sorry!  I noticed you butted up against the invisible walls when trying to blow air, as well - I'll have to expand the edges of the overworld map 1 screen-width away from the edge of the island...)

Thanks!  

Thanks!  Yeah, I ran out of time to get content in.

For future puzzles, the idea is more that the player will  come to intuitively understand bits of fluid dynamics by solving the puzzles, part of that is just adding more complicated steps to the problem of burning things.  An important part of this is limiting the players' wind ability- I want to make the mouse cursor become 'physical' when you're doing magic such that you can't add wind inside a room, behind a wall, unless you can snake your mouse cursor in.   With this limitation, there's a lot more leeway to make puzzles of the sort "how do you get the correct pattern of airflow into this room only by manipulating what's outside of it?" (There are grates that air can pass through but physical things can't). 

Here are some puzzle elements I want to add:

- vertical windmills that do different things depending on which side you blow them on (imagine a puzzle where you have to spin this thing clockwise to make a door open, but counterclockwise to close it)

- Opening and closing doors to influence airflow in pipes

- Ice floors (you can blow yourself and objects with your wind)

-Trying not to burn things (A room full of TNT with a torch in the middle, but you have to use your air to solve a problem)

-Something something tesla valves

There'll be variants on the 'just light the candle on fire' puzzle that explore more and more interesting obstructions - that might be the first thing I finish.

You are a wizard who can control the air with his mind.  There are torches, and unlit white candles.  You must light the candles, but cannot yourself conjure fire, so get to blowing!

This version actually has puzzles!  Well, two of them.  I rushed to add the level selection and so on, and only found the time to add two levels plus the hub area... more to come.

This demo is a puzzle game.  There are cryptic clues to the controls in the intro area, but here they are again in case it's not clear:

WASD to move

Left click + drag to throw the wind around.  This is your main way of interacting with the world.

E to open and close doors and use teleport crystals.

ESC to return to the hub/quit the game if you're in the hub.

(There are more controls, including the level editor, but they're hidden behind bebug mode - see if you can find them >:) )

I might add more maps/puzzles over the weekend, but I'll be quite busy, so we'll see.

Thanks for playing!  Please tell me how the game felt if you played it.

Good to hear!  Optimizing this thing is a bit weird (lots of GPU crosstalk).  
(It's actually constantly simulating all of the tiles representing wind and fire for the whole island, which means performance is constant w.r.t. those things...)
Thanks for playing!  I hope to have a gameplay demo for next DD :)

Not a bug per se, I uploaded a new version to fix some framerate problems another commenter was having and this - spawning bushes around an entity - was what I was experimenting with at the time (as a prototype for how elementals might work).  I should probably have set the game world to a more 'normal' state before uploading!

Yep, just sticking a while(time not right){} loop at the end fixed it!  I've uploaded a new version with the improved performance (it feels a lot better at a solid 60FPS than 30!), plus one or two other little things I added over the weekend.  Thanks for the help, friendly lain-anon :)

Thanks for mentioning this, I'm seeing it on my windows machine as well. 

I think I see the problem.  To maintain 60FPS, the game sleeps for the remainder.  At least on my windows machine, when it does this, it sometimes sleeps for way too long (even though the requested sleep time is correct).  This is what's behind it being at 30FPS on your machine.  Very strange, I'll have to put in a better system.

No, the default is 60!  If your PC is beefy then it running at 30 is  probably a bug...  Are you on Windows?

If you run and press 'g', that'll show the profiler.  This is what it looks like for me (running generally at a comfortable 60fps)...  It could be a problem in the vsync implementatio of the graphics libraries I'm using.

Thanks for playing :)

Hm.  The jumping is part of an attempted optimization that's less noticeable at 60fps (batching world-driven changes to the sim and only uploading them to the GPU every few frames), but when limiting my own FPS to 30 it becomes obvious and ugly.  It looks like I'll have to replace that with something better, thanks for pointing it out!

Glad you find them fun - that means it's time to build interesting things out of them!

The dynamic background animations are neat!  Especially the transition to the star mode.

Looking forward to see what else you add to flesh out the game, if you decide to.

Haha, the red triangle's just a test triangle I forgot to remove!
Thanks for giving it a go.  Your rig's a lot better than mine!

I like the look of things.  Agree with Tinto on the sprite origins/collision being a problem.

Also, the enemy seemed to have a hard time picking the right directional attack to use.  I was flying above it for a while, and for three attacks in a row it would attack down.

Looking forward to seeing what you build this into!

It's a tech demo of a game where you're a wizard interacting with the world via fluid dynamics!  Drag the air to blow it around, add heat, burn grass and bushes (and yourself, if you're not careful!) 

If you download it, please tell me if and how well it ran on your machine.  The fluid dynamics are a bit resource-intensive! You can get performance info with 't' and 'g.'.

You have a character now.

WASD to move him around

LEFT CLICK to add heat into the world

RIGHT CLICK + drag to blow air around

Heat hurts you as well.  (No health bar yet, I'll try to add that by the end of the weekend...)

The goblins walk towards and away from you, but they're not very clever (they get stuck on the walls) and they can't hurt you yet.  You can blow them (and yourself) around with wind, though!  Or burn them to death (you monster...)

'r' regenerates the map

'z' generates a flat plain

'f' reverses the flow of time for fluids (sort of).

in general, most of the arrow keys do something debug-y.  

Nice visuals.  Are you doing a falling-sand fluid sim for the shells?

The platforming and spirit mode are tricky!  In particular, it took me some time to figure out what spirit mode even was...  the room with the tutorial in seems a bit small to build up the required speed?  Clearly I was doing it wrong, somehow...  
Killed the void lord (just barely!) by wall jumping up above him and hovering in the air at the top of the shaft shooting down.

Fun game!

I get the same issue as jamak.

Hm.  On my machine, It couldn't find liblua.so.5.4. I have lua 5.4 on the machine, I checked, but it's in /usr/lib64 as liblua5.4.so.5.4.  I made a copy under the right name, and when I tried to run the program I got 'Illegal Instruction', which I imagine is a lua thing?

Thanks for playing!  Yeah, the floor is made of grass, and under high heat it'll catch fire and burn, feeding heat which catches more grass on fire... 
I have some pretty in-depth technical plans for the sound design - I want the crackle of burning grass, the whistling of wind, goblin screams...  made as procedurally from the world as I can manage.

Thanks for giving it a go! Yes, it needs more visual/audio feedback about things in the world burning and contributing heat.

I definitely want to keep the analogue/intuitive feel!  The spell casting system I have planned is built around exploring/using that as much as possible.

In my dev version, you can blow the goblins around with the wind, and later you'll be able to freeze water on the floor to make ice, which'll make things a lot easier to push around and send careening into each other...

It'll be a proper game!  ..Eventually...