Caster Fight!

nice job sir.

It was a bit too hard. I'd suggest making a difficulty option so players can at least get the hang of the game before playing at that level. While the pixel art itself wasn't the best, the animations were great! The audio was a bit annoying because there weren't any variants in the spell sounds, so it got rather repetitive. Overall, it was a decent game! Good work!

as I expected, iron snout with magic. Very good

I like it. I found it a little too easy to spam attacks without putting too much effort into it. I think limiting the amount or type of attacks would create a fun mental game, forcing you to think more your attacks.

Personally I found the graphics excelled at their job, they were easily readable, but their aesthetic could be improved. The sound was useful to identify the type of attack but maybe it needs a little tweaking because it can become overwhelming fast. But I kinda enjoy the chaos of the battle that comes out.

Overall, I like it, good job

I love iron snout and this game it doing good. I guess it's too difficult for me, as the attacks come so fast, and it seems I take more damage than the enemy? Hmm. My fingers hurt LOL

The feel of the game is good, overall. The frequency of the enemies is just right! Theme has been used in a unique way, which is good. And you want to play the game again and again! Only thing, artwork could have been better though. However, whatever you are presenting suits the environment! Good.

Well done! I like the gameplay, though it was way to hard for me. Whenever using the "zxc" keys, please remember, that people with a german keyboard layout have no real chance of getting this right.
The game starts very suddenly, which made me just hammer all the keys xD

Well executed!

Please try to use different keybindings the next time.
European keyboards have the z key where your y key is located and that makes it almost impossible for me to play your game the way it was supposed to.
Now, I like the premise. I played One Finger Death Punch and it is an interesting idea to do it with mages.
The problem here is, finger death punch had 2 Inputs. Left and Right. You have 8 Inputs. Left, Fire, Water, Earth, Right, Fire, Water, Earth. And with that speed you are putting out, it is way to hard right now. Move the casters further away and slow down the speed of the attacks.
But I like your little turtle animation. It looks cute.

@KorbohneD
Next game jam I'll do what I can in regards to keybinds (I've run slightly afould of AZERTY keybinds in other games, it makes sense that mine being QWERTY would also mess things up a bit), and if I had more time (other commitments ate into jam time), I'd have done things to help scale the difficulty over time.

You enabled anonymous comments, so I'll assume you're waiting for the non-sugar-coated version of feedback.

First thing I did was change your code to use Y instead of Z :D

I would have liked a somewhat better description of how to counter certain attacks, but in the end it was so fast, that there was no planning possible anyway. I ended up just spamming Y-Y-X-X-C-C-Left-Y-Y-X-X-C-C-Right-Repeat and that won the game :-p

The individual sprites look good, though the whole screen looks a bit empty and could use some extra detail in the background. The different pixel size on the moon and the smooth font don't really fit into the graphical whole.

The audio works good with the rest of the game. Can't go wrong with pure noise samples :D

The use of theme was about as creative as it was in my game: average at best. But the theme was very specific, I don't think there was much else possible. But some clever people always come up with something, so I have to leave the top rankings for those.

The gameplay works good, though I wish there was some kind of input buffering or at least an indicator when it would be possible to cast the next spell, because the quick progression from one to the other sometimes ended up not casting each of the spells. Maybe if the game was a bit slower overall, then one would actually have time to think and counter the enemy's attack.

Besides that, I didn't notice any real flaws in the implementation or the idea.

I think the game has some original ideas, but none of them are groundbreaking.

Overall, it is a well implemented little game, perfectly fine for a solo compo entry. It is a bit small all in all (when considering the amount of content and gameplay available) and together with the things pointed out above and comparing other games I've rated this Alakajam, I'm going to give you an overall score of 4 stars.

there is not much time to think of an element to shoot

The attack barrages are too fast to actually react to and in my playtime that meant pure buttonmashing. If the fight started slower and went on a slow crescendo along the player's ability to react, the experience would be much better in my opinion. The design of the game itself seems engaging if it weren't for that little thing.

Hi! We played your game with Danae on this twitch channel, and now the video is available on YouTube. Feel free to check it out :)

Danae plays: Caster Fight!

Oh man, I can't keep up this kind of crazy speed any more! A gradual increase in difficulty would be great as @Filo suggested.

The graphics are crude, but the animations save the day. The wave animation is very nice and the characters are cute too.

Not exactly alchemy, but close enough. Ok job in all.

O 4, G 5, A 3, G 3, O 3, T 5

This is a fun little game. Good job!

A good game idea that unfortunately lacks difficulty balancing to be really fun.

For the first playthroughs everything got way too fast for me to learn the controls and how elements matched - then I started mashing buttons in order, just trying to optimize the presses against the cooldown while making sure to face my opponent. After a couple attempts it was enough to let me win the game.

Too bad you didn't have more time to make the difficulty ramp up, and maybe introduce the elements progressively rather than all 3 at once. Another detail is that if you cast the wrong element, it passes by the enemy shot instead of being destroyed. I think that's the main reason mashing buttons works. With those balancing issues fixed this would definitely be a solid entry.

Otherwise the turtle animations are cute, the ones for elements are good as well, and while the rest of the art is more simplistic, it seems to pay tribute to early DOS games so I feel the 4.7 rating is harsh. I would have given Graphics a 6 or 7.

@wan Yeah. It really could have used another 8 hours of work, and a couple rounds of feedback from a playtester or two. Such is life, some times.

Challenging game! I included it in my Alakajam #1 compilation video series, if you’d like to take a look. :) https://youtu.be/wEu1KZRTQq8