Modern Alchemy

Hi dollarone,
great game and definitely the most beautiful cauldron of all! (see twitter).
I like the unique graphic style as well as the sound effects and the music. Everything fits very nicely together.
At first I was a little bit lost regarding what to do. For me, the introductory text as well as the speechbubbles of the customers vanished way to quick. If there is a timer, make it like two times or just wait for the player to click the message away.
Other than that, The only thing I would suggest is adding a replay button.

Great game, really like it!

I had so much fun carefully chosing the ingredient of the potion :) I probably killed a customer or two, but does it matter ? This music is nice too.

510 gold - I'm not a very good alchemist I think…

I liked the art a lot, it really gave a sense of an alchemist's shop, filled with strange reagents (and what passes as reagents in modern times would make any health inspector faint! Very entertaining!). Some of the reagents were a bit hard to spot though (e.g. the bottles hidden behind the counter/customer).

The mechanics were interesting, and it was very fun to try to guess the various properties of the reagents, and match them to the customer demands. A suggestion regarding usability, would be to add tool tips with the reagent names to the reagents. Having to pick them up and drop them felt a bit clunky.

The game seemed to be missing an end-condition for when you ran out of ingredients? (with one ingredient to spare?). I would also recommend that you add this as well, if you make a post-jam version of the game.

The music worked well with the humorous take on the theme!

Brewing strange potions…
Oops! Poisoned the customer!
…that was my last stuff!

thanks so much for comments!

some replies:

the introductory text as well as the speechbubbles of the customers vanished way to quick. If there is a timer, make it like two times or just wait for the player to click the message away.

I actually implemented click-to-skip functionality. However, looks like my devbox runs the game at a slower pace than most modern machines, so the max waiting time is set pretty low. I found this out when testing on my macbook pro just after the deadline :)

Other than that, The only thing I would suggest is adding a replay button.

heh, there is a replay button (R), but I didn't test it so it re-starts the music without cancelling the old one :S

Some of the reagents were a bit hard to spot though

ah but this is intentional! :)

The game seemed to be missing an end-condition for when you ran out of ingredients?

yes indeed, I simply ran out of time. Even just a summary screen with your final money when you have 1 ingredient left would have sufficed. Oh well!

Love the music and sfx in particular, nice graphics too. Nitpick: would be nice if you could put items back without picking up another one.

Ended up with 640 gold and two Xs. It's fun figuring out what ought to work! I wonder if there's a perfect play… at one point I ran out of good ingredients for love potions.

Really like the idea of looking at differetn objects and thinking how they can meet the needs of the customer. Funny little concept. Banana + condom went down well.

The text at the start was REALLY too fast to read, so I felt a bit overwhlemed at the start. Pace that better, and I think it'll improve the user experience. Great job!

Hey !
Nice idea, your game is funny, I killed a lot of people at the beginning (and at the end) cause I don't really know all the recipes but that an interesting gameplay, the graphics are… ok x) and the music is cool (have you done it ?).
Well done ! ^^

thanks for more feedback, folks!

Call_in: @albertpaixao made the music!

I have now added a post-compo version with all the "missing" things discussed earlier:

• increased time for speech bubbles
• working replay button (R)
• end-condition for when you run out of ingredients

I also tweaked the ingredient properties (it's now possible to make AMAZING potions of all types) and added a name for the potion you're currently mixing. Additionally I set the starting money to $0, and made it possible to click anywhere to deselect your current ingredient, as suggested by @thomastc.

Played the Post-Jam version (impossible to read anything in the original…)

On initial playthough managed 420 big ones, next time got 500 out of the very first potion! Made 1860 in the end and didn't even get reported to the authorities.

Spot-on concept, pleasant interactivity, funky music; a solid entry in all. The only aspect lacking in my opinion is the graphics. Some of the items look fine, others not so much and the people are outright creepy! I'm glad you can't see their faces. It is not the most original idea either.

O 7, G 3, A 8, G 8, O 3, T 10

Very fun! I got a high score of 1090 after some playthroughs. Had me laughing the whole time! Also, I should try gulping down a rose, some red wine and a condom hot from a cauldron some time…

interesting idea.

I scored 940 due to a high scoring energy drink combo, but for the most part it was too hard to choose the correct ingredients to combine. There may be some cryptic logic as to what works or it may be nonsensical. I didn't feel motivated enough to determine which.

The customer requests appeared to be random because of how they would repeat. But as supplies ran out (like the aforementioned energy drinks) a successful high-scoring concoction couldn't be prepared again. And since a high-scoring concoction is worth considerably more than several low scoring concotions, there's perhaps no incentive to save ingredients for possible future encounters. Which in turn made me feel the game was more luck based than skill based.

• theme fits ok
• originality is average
• graphics are mostly average but nice in places
• sound is nice but didn't feel well fitting
• gameplay felt a bit too random.

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: Modern Alchemy

Ended my first session with no money earned at all and the cops shutting my shop down.
Second game gave me 410 gold before being shut down.

I don't think I got the logic behind the system. Maybe introducing a few hints here and there might make it more engaging. For me it was just random clicking.

Use of theme is good, if maybe a bit obvious. The graphics have their own charme, but due to the game scaling to the full size of the browser window, the pixels got scaled non-uniformly, which makes them look cheaper than they actually are. There's also something wrong with the layering: Text appears between different shop graphics layers, it covers the cauldron but is covered by the counter.

Audio is good, but it requires some goodwill to see it fit into the theme of the game.

Gameplay is, as I mentioned earlier, too random for me. I think more could be done there.

Originality is hard to judge for me, I feel like there should be lots of similar games, but I couldn't name a single one.

I've spent about 10 minutes trying to figure out a fair overall rating. Comparing with other games I've judged, adjusting for team/solo and all that. I think 4 stars is appropriate, mostly because of how random the game feels. If I had been able to understand the logic behind the brewing and it was meaningful in some way, I would have given 6 stars.

Really nice idea! I included it in my Alakajam #1 compilation video series, if you’d like to take a look. :) https://youtu.be/fRBZG2NbaE8