Hi there,

This is a great game. It feels really polished and the graphics are top notch. The animations (especially the explosives) look great an you paid attention to small details like the blink on the hearts. The controls are intuitive and I like the idea of having different attacks on different directions. I like the fact that you have even different types of enemies.

Two things you could improve: The audio is not super balanced, like the throwing and explosion sounds could be a little bit more diverse (set pitch randomly or create 4 different versions of a sound that will be played randomly).
For Balancing every potion felt useful but the ice potion. The slow is not strong enough, so i ignored it most of the time as it did not seem to do damage to enemies.

All in all a great game, which i really enjoyed!

Thanks for the comments @Laguna!

You are on point with both things. We may try to change the balancing a bit to make every potion useful. Right now the Ice one seems to be the least powerful. We would like to make it very important in the late game where the enemies are faster.

As far as the sounds, we didn't have any experience with sound creating so we tries to do what we could. Now we know a lot more and your comments and this experience will help us next time.

Cheers!

Alright, to begin, great job - especially for a small jam.

Now, to begin with the start screen. Kinda sad to see that the game doesn't have a 1080p option. That's okay though. Many people are put-off by windowed settings though. You might want to take that in consideration if you choose to continue developing this game.

Tutorial - I like how the tutorial is laid-out, but you could literally have those controls as a seperate layer (semi-transparent) in the main game. Have them fade out in a minute so that the player gets a hang of things. The sudden jump into the game is not only startling, but can shock the player into losing a life before the game even begins.

Art - I love the simple-pixel art style of the game, the animations are good too, especially those on the electric potion. The tileset is simple and gets the job done too. The enemies have different models, but they all behave the same and have the same speed. If the different types of enemies were supposed to be a difficulty progression, it wasn't clear to me. My major issue is with the pickups. Till I had exhausted the fire/bomb potion, I didn't even realize that there were pickups scattered on the ground. As such, you might want to either explain the pickups better or make them pop out more to the player.

gameplay - The core game loop of directional potion-throwing is simple, engaging and innovative. Having the chance to customize one's loadouit before the level begins could be an amazing way to build on this. So would having potions interact with one another (for example, the frost potion could work with the electricity potion to create a slow'n'damage zone.) But those are throughts for the future. As mentioned in the art segment, the frost potion seems a bit weak, but if you can cause enemies to stay longer on the poison potion using it, it evolves into one of the stronger potions in the game for crowd control.

Progression is an issue. I get that this is a prototype, but having a boss or a few more types of enemies would have shown the potential of the game a lot better. As such, all I can see of 'progression' in the game is having to fight more enemies every wave. That might work for a while, but it gets boring real fast.

Sound - The throwing and explosion sounds are not the cleanest, but that works. The song loop in the game gets boring very fast, but as this is a prototype, I won't consider that an issue.

3/5, good effort, guys!

I can not choose words to describe this masterpiece … I only know that when I grow up I want to be like you. hehehe…

This is a very fun game! I love the game design, it is very clever and fun to play. The only thing I could point out is that I didn't even notice at first the pickups on the ground, I thought they were some particle effect or something. Overall I really like this entry!

Amazingly fun ! The art is effective. I'm generally not fan of this kind of music but it really serve the fast paced action.
The imposed throwing direction of the different potions and their different curses give a very profound game play.
That's the game I played the most for now. Great job!

I really liked this. The idea of trying the controls on main menu before starting is a great mechanic. though be aware that if you press the fire potion you instantly hit the guy with being able to try the controls, maybe reposition him. Sound was good, maybe a long loop for audio woulda been great. Really liked the mechanics, the restrictions of potion only being usable in certain direactions. Would be a great addition if some form combos were possible. Maybe there were, but I just didn't discover them.

Fun, really nicely polished, nice pixel art, and the 4 direction potion thing was a nice twist. Only downside was the typical thing in arena shooters of the straighforward enemy movement making it easy to kite them round that makes the gameplay get a bit boring. Overall great job

Hey there,
I like the grapics of your game, they are cool, items and environment are nice, the gameplay is a bit frustrating on the first games, the fact that all the potions have a precise direction is strange but with some retry that become more funny ^^

Well done :)

A solid top down arena shooter, yet very average due to a few things.

Good things first, as is proper. The graphics are fine and so are the controls. The music could have used more work as the 10 second loop, while not sounding terrible, does get stale in about 20 seconds once you realize it is, indeed, a loop.

The gimmick is somewhat thematic, but when I think of alchemy I think about mixing and transmuting elements, not ready-made potions. Still, having different potions for each direction is an original idea and it works well.

Enough beating around the bush. The main issue here is the lack of enemy variety. They just rush towards the player, no dodging, no ranged attacks, no spells, no lunging, no teleporting, no shielding… You get the point, it becomes boring after a minute or two. There are a lot of small, easy to implement, enemy abilities which would spice up the combat encounters, forcing the player to do a bit thinking on who to attack first and such.

Good effort. With a little more work this could get much more exciting to play.

O 5, G 8, A 5, G 5, O 5, T 3

Very fun game! I included it in my Alakajam #1 compilation video series, if you’d like to take a look. :) https://youtu.be/-pQ9tgCeUug