Manuel the Alchemist - Alakajam #1
Play as an Alchemist proffesor and fight your old experiments as you progress through the academy corridors
You are Manuel, an Alchemy professor in the Guiri Academy, a hidden place where you teach your students how to create potions and manipulate metals. During your last class, where you taught them how to turn their blood into steel, you fell unconscious. The game begins after you regain your consciousness. You have to walk the academy corridors to find your students and figure out what happened but it's not as easy as you thought in the first place: your old experiments have come alive and you have to fight them.
We didn't have enough time to add the bosses but it was meant to be the students raging against you.
This was the idea we wanted to implement: As you pass on the levels, you'll eventually find the final boss: a dark form of yourself. At this point, you should realize what actually happened was that you split up yourself into a good and bad form and once the bossfight ends and you get a win you also realize that the first Manuel (the one you're controlling) was actually the bad Manuel and the students and experiments were only protecting the good one.
This was our first jam ever and also Nefertits' first game. She was more in charge of the graphics and NiciusB were in charge of the coding. We hope you like it!
You can find us on Twitter:
Nefertits: @Nefertits
NiciusB: @Balbonator
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EDIT:
We did some minor bugfixes post-jam, all avaliable in the repository: https://github.com/NiciusB/FirstGameJam
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CONTROLS:
Left or right click to use your current weapon
Press "E" near to chests to open them. You can collect new weapons, or potions.
Sometimes you can get the same weapon you're using. So it'll look like nothing happened. Sorry!
If your potion list is full, you'll automatically use the potion
Press "1", "2", "3" to use potions
Comments (13)
@fullmontis Thank you so much for your feedback. The end of the hallway teleports you to the next level but it was intended to lead you to the bossfight which we counldn't implement yet.
We had a problem with the knife and we wanted to fix the animation so you could easily know when you're hitting the enemies (specially those above you) but we also wanted to finish the game on time haha
I was in charge of the graphics and I know I had a lot to improve but it was my very first time working on the art, I'm more comfortable with coding rather than doing the graphics but I'm satisfied with the result anyway :D
There are 4 types of potions related to the health and the movement but we decided to leave the mystery to the players! If we finish the game we will also add some funny effects to the potions.
And again, thank you so much for your comment! I'd like to finish the game but I'm afraid we will be a bit slow. Anyway I had so much fun doing this, I'm looking forward the next jam so I can make more improvements!
Dungeon adventure is always exciting when you aquire a new equipment! I love the different effects of the multiple choices of weapons. It would be better if you can do some effects on enemy when they are hit. It's a little hard to see the hit point clearly as the text is black tho.
And I'm not sure what does the orange potion for? I drank one and … died.
This game has Rogue like feel to it, reminds me of Our Darker Purpose. I played your game once so i don't know how much changes with every playthorugh. I like how you made managing potions an interesting task, not every potion benefits player so for example when i had three potions i first drank two orange ones to damage myself and then green to negate that damage. I also like variety of weapons, at first i thought that staff was the best but on later levels enemies got more HP and i had to switch to 'book' that had more DPS in overall. Gameplay is really fun and entertaining but after while might get repetetive (i beat 7 floors before dying) but that is undetstandable due to limited time hence less enemies and other mechanics. But i still had a real good time playing this game. Graphics are pretty and set lighthearted tone to the game. I also liked story in your game description. In overall really cool game that is entertaining to play.
Floor 1: Theres some skelletons here but I'm sure this knife will take care of th…..Dead
Floor 1 again: Maybe i was a little slow with the slashing let's try aga….Dead
Floor 1 again: Oh a chest, oh a szepter of exploding things, take that skelletons
Floor 2: Stands behind table with tome of lavaing and clicks every second or so
….
Floor 4: Still standing behind table clicking, they mentioned a boss in their description so i guess I'l keep going till that
….
Floor 7: Well my potions are full, i have presumably the best weapon and dont wanna be hurt by a random potion so let's ignore chests from now on
Floor 8: Kinda bored of standing behind a table clicking, maybe they've put the boss at Floor 10 let's keep going
….
Floor 10: Still standing behind table clicking, maybe the've been kinda cheeky and put the boss at Floor 13
…..
Floor 13: Gets mobbed by enemies at the start…Dead
Floor 1: Welp guess I misread the description or that dark form boss is waaay down there
What I'm trying to get at is that I would have preferred either designed levels(even if extremely short) or enemies that are able to shoot back to keep me engaged.
I quite enjoyed that the different weapons are also mechanically completely different even though a set number of charges for the stronger ones might have been nice to force me to use them all instead of sticking with the 'best' one.
Feedbacktime!
Hitboxes to big, Got stuck often.
Pixelart with different pixelsizes. It is mostly a personal opinion, but I think it just looks off if there are different sizes on the same screen.
Knife useless. I die if I use it, because I have to go to close to the enemy.
I like the arm wiggling.
Bad potions are useless if you can't throw the out once you know what colour they are. Never reward a player with a bad item.
Screen should scroll earlier. If my character has to walk all the way to the right to make it scroll, I can't react to the enemy.
Played until level 15 before I decided to quit.
The starting weapon was way too horrible. And you even had the decency to try to give it again from chests (at least you could just put it back there). And the other weapons felt a bit too powerful compared to how dumb and weak the enemies were. So you just need to hope to get any of the other two weapons from the first few chests and you've pretty much beat the game :)
The potions were pretty useless as well. And even after learning them, you'd get stuck with an inventory full of the crappy ones so you'd need to just use them to get more space. So after a handful of levels, I just completely gave up on opening the chests at all (already had the OP wand weapon).
The furtiture hitboxes were bad. Like here, I should be able to walk right but no…
Also, more player feedback would be nice. Like some effects to hint at potion effects and something to make it clearer if I'm damaging enemies or they're damaging me. Adding sound effects would be quite an easy choice here…
I really skipped the above comments potion. HAHA!! Anyways, game was nice. I mean the art and the monsters were appreciable. But the gameplay seemed a little tougher, also the level things..
Is it like we have to find our way up?
Or we are upgraded as we clear the floor off monsters?
in either cases, I wasn't able to clear the level :P
@mampee The exit of each level is on the far right side so you pretty much need to clear all the enemies. You get upgrades from chests with 'E'. There is even an interactive button press prompt when you get near them but it is super tiny.
Well, the obvious issues have already been pointed out, I won't reiterate. Here are a few design ideas instead:
Randomly going back to the knife again isn't that great. How 'bout turning the more powerful weapons into temporary powerups instead? (the knife needs improvement, though)
The potions could have more interesting effects (not that I really know what most of them do, apart from healing and anti-healing). Stuff like: shield, speed-up, size change, higher attack speed. Clearly visible effects are preferable.
If the characters were smaller you could have more enemies on screen and make them occasionally shoot back too. Facilitates dodging as well.
Those are the ideas, then the boring aspects. Graphics are fine. The golem is neat while the other characters too pixely for my taste; backgrounds are ok too. Not a very original idea, top-down shooter, or a thematic one. You could reskin this with wizards and magic losing nothing.
O 4, G 5, A -, G 3, O 3, T 3
Also, Nefertits… Kek.
Very challenging game. I included it in my Alakajam #1 compilation video series, if you’d like to take a look. :) https://youtu.be/-pQ9tgCeUug
I reached the end of the hallway, which I suppose is the end of the level.
I liked using the staff much more than the knife, mostly because I knew when I hit the enemy. With the knife it was kinda hard to understand when I was hitting it or not if I didn't look at the numbers falling.
The graphics are functional but a little barebones.
I didn't understand how the potions worked: none of them healed me and one actually hurt me! I don't know if this was intentional or not, but I found it interesting because it requires you to be more careful with using them.
Overall, I think this was a good entry considering it was your first jam! Good job! I wish you could implement the boss battle because it sounded interesting.