Game is amazing, i spent way to much time on it already xD I love the concept of it but i really wish i could select my starting items, could be by unlocking new ones by playing or buying them in a shop or smthing similar ? Could add a small coins that you get after winning then you can buy the potions or items you want !! Otherwise the game is great, would definitely recommend ^w^
Amazing game. I would love to see different starting bags become available. I'm dead set on trying to make a more unique strategy work. Still, every time I try to go for anything that is too far from the basic allure potion plan, I lose too quickly before I even get any kind of new synergy between my potions going. (A hopefully easy-to-implement idea for this could be to choose a starting bag from one of the witches you encounter.)
Got a bug to report, not sure if it's an issue on my end or maybe godot but I might as well
So, I decided to download the game both on the itch io app and using my browser, and both times after it got past the godot loading screen, all i would see is a nlack screen with little black squares that were blinking rapidly, there was noise but other than that I couldn't click anything or do anything, however for some reason i can play it on my browser so I'm not sure what's going on there.
I love this game. The witches are cute and the gameplay has me hooked!
My main complaint is that the game has a tendency to softlock, especially common when coolant or viscous is in play (things that change the cast time.) It can throw the game into a broken state where casting potions doesn't work and nobody can win or lose regardless of sub-zero allure.
There's also a bug with expansion elixir in tier 5/6. If ingredients grow too large, they can spill out of the pot into the other player's, even potentially cause the other player to overflow. Maybe there should be a maximum size for ingredients to grow to?
Also, even after the nerfs, bovine elixir is super oppressive. Maybe casting a bovine elixir could downgrade it once or remove it from the bag? Maybe corruption elixir could remove it from the bag after converting it?
Seems to be majorly unstable. I’ve only gotten it to run once. Every other time, the window either doesn’t appear at all, I get stuck on a solid grey screen with sound, it never goes past the Godot logo, or it crashes on the godot logo.
EDIT: So, I watched this in Process Monitor, and when it fails to load, it’s constantly opening “Potions and Polycules.pck”, reading 512 bytes at offset 202,237,062, 4,096 bytes at 384,490,080, 202,236,720, and 384,493,728, and closing it, followed by failed attempts to open \scripts\particles\bubble_particle.gdc.import, over and over again.
At one point, it also wrote a lot to the log file, which led to me check it, and I found it full of this error:
I'm afraid this is one of those 'works on my machine' type problems that're tricky to track down, so thankyou very much for the detailed bug report
I'm currently working on an update that, among other things, ports the project to the latest stable Godot release which with any luck should improve stability - but I will investigate if there's anything funky going on with the bubble particle prefab.
It would be nice if you could customize the witch you play as instead of leaving it at random. Still, amazing game, been playing for hours and I can't stop!
Super addicted to what little I can manage to play. Even if it takes me 30mins to get a handful in the polycule, I can't stop going back to try again! Sadly 70% of my runs end thanks to a crash.
I particularly enjoyed the 'send to opponent' type effects. I'm a little iffy on the slime ones as they merge very easily and they don't tend to have any effect at the 6* potency since...they're supposed to take up cauldron space not sit in the infinite liquid state! Would recommend that they 'revert' to solid on cast, so that they go back into the cauldron instead of disappearing. At least for the ones that are meant to be thrown at the opponent. Would be a great way to make use of the opponent's liquid mechanic if you filled it up and the moment they cast they're hit with a wall of slime! Maybe a slime that cleans the opponent's slime on infusion but deals allure based on their slime potency at cast.
edit:Wow this ended up as a wall of text and a half! TLDR; Lots of troubleshooting to find out my pc is officially potato and to fix that would require gambling on bsod, and that's just to fix whatever the debugger wants not what the game demands.
I can only guess that my gpu is barely strong enough to play the game but only marginally and any performance humps means a crash. So essentially, I can only ask for better optimization if I want to actually play.
I found out exactly how outdated my pc is because of this game haha! All the debugging told me that I really really needed to update my graphics driver...only it took me a couple days of troubleshooting to find out that my pc has a manufacturer lock on it's drivers and they stopped supporting my pc years before even intel stopped as well. I found out I can 'unlock' it by reverting first and then using external programs/tools and make it update towards intel's drivers(which has a community that recently put out a new update), but that comes with the bsod risks, don't know if this game is worth bricking my computer...it's real close though~~! I also think the error code is the debugger failing and not what actually crashed the game since it won't stop trying to access debug files for drivers that don't want to be debugged and the community is only as helpful as 'ignore that as the developer'. It wasn't a waste of time though, I at least found some updates for other drivers that couldn't be found automatically by windows. In the process of all that I found out my calculator was corrupted...somehow, and it was the pebble in the cog stopping the 'final' windows update from going through, that took a full day of troubleshooting to fix. Managed to update everything as much as possible and cleaned up tons of clutter. So yay for a slightly faster pc experience...even if it had zero impact on my gaming experience. I can now use my browser at normal speeds even under slightly above average throughput!
The problems I'm facing thus can't rely on the debug logs, and I'll just do it old school via guestimation!
During launch is most likely the more common performance issues. It's just my pc has potato gpu so frame drops during preloading become game breaking instead. Pretty sure what's crashing me on launch is the wavy texture plus the front heavy loading. When the wavy font moves around by going through the different menus it does a decent sized frame stutter. I can see it being a draw on the system through the tutorial with it's moving boxes of texts.
Then what crashes mid game seems to be a combination of different entity updates like honey blocks detecting if it hit another honey block but it'll crash if it checks at the wrong time. Game also really hates when I hold a potion whilst the opponent is casting, or hover descriptions, or hover over refresh. This one's usually ok early on but the more potions out the worse it becomes, and especially so the bigger the polycule count as if the cache is being filled with prior rounds. Maybe some potions or sprite transformations data aren't being erased?
I've found the honey block and sprials to be particularly heavy on my pc. There's also the milk transformation, but that depends on the sprite being effected for some reason. Some sprites really don't like the milk, like instant crash even on the first step of milkers.
On that note some sprites improve my performance quite a bit so sometimes I reroll just for my witch to be one of them. Weirdly they can tank the effects well enough that would slow or even crash other ones.
I'll see if I can use some of this information to optomise the game a lil further, but I won't lie - I don't really know how much of this I really have the power to fix
The troubleshooting was mostly just sifting through useless guides/Q&As. Also because every source on my pc's spec was vague about the graphics name/spec/gen, I still don't actually know since it's 1 of 3 very different ones and I just used the archived manufacturer files that encompassed the whole pc build. Though thank the heavens for some random guy who gave succinct cmd prompt lines which fixed dism/cbs before attempting to fix the pc.
The launch bug...not much since that's just potato intel graphics, but maybe add a persistent and more thorough settings menu. The game always opens at max resolution, and it'd be nice to be able to tone down the particle effects and animations like bubbles, spirals, and such. The reduced particle effect could just be a singular bubble that expands briefly before popping, lots of entities spawning and erasing is a breeding ground for some to become permanent if the process gets interrupted. The wavy text is probably the easiest to turn off, which I'm sure is why hover descriptions add so much strain. Don't know why hovering on the refresh does, maybe because of the little animation it does? Holding potions is more a physics problem which is...a huge ask to optimize to say it lightly! A more specific ask would be a 'clear effects' button in the pause menu, since sometimes a transformation is applied poorly and the game really struggles from after that. Which gets cleaned a bit after clearing the level, but there's a subtle change in the minimum strain from then on. The spirals only really become a problem because...they're kind of op and you're more likely to have at least half your pot filled with a dozen or more of them before you clear the level. So the shear quantity of spirals become a problem when they all individually spin.
Another optimization is to put all the transformations into a buffer zone. Like a 'combo' counter or something where it'll hold all the effects until after the potions settle down, then applies it either sequentially or at once depending on how the coding handles transformation. Though if you go that route, you'd also have to include an after battle break so that we can actually admire the sprite's transformations since it currently skips straight to the 'shop' menu upon winning. The shop is also a great point in time to clear up the cache a bit and should overall keep the performance in peak condition throughout a run. Stuff like double checking if all the potions and transformation have been cleared, as well as freeing up prior sprites from remaining cached since it'd be rare to get identical sprites. It'll add a loading time, but it'd also speed up the game.
I'm also going out on a limb and guessing that the honey block has extra/redundant checks since the other slime blocks don't crash my game. Honey will crash my game if it collides with something at heavy strain moments, even if it's not the honey block being dropped in. Probably not much of a difference for others, but when you're already throttling the line even slight spikes become more obvious.
I really enjoyed the game, thank you for making it! I really liked looking at the various TFs and their progression.
I also like how there's a bit of real-time elements, so you can do things like try to save your pot from backfiring by causing it to brew first, or save yourself from hitting 0 allure by brewing something while the allure is ticking down.
I seem to have found a good strategy for winning fights:
--------------------
As fast as you can, put 3-4 Lv5 Expansion potions and then Brew the pot, using rerolls as necessary to force the ingredients to show up.
Ideally you'd splash 1-2 eggplant or Hypno potions in there as well to force a backfire, but they aren't completely necessary.
After brewing the other side's pot's ingredients should expand and cause a backfire.
From then on you keep piling on expansion to maintain the large ingredient size while doing other stuff and then win since you're doing stuff and they are not.
This game is really well made. Any thoughts in creating an in game store to let the player buy different potions to start with?
I would love to be able to experience all of what this game has to offer without needing to rely on RNG.
An example store could be something like spend a in game currency that lets you trade your starting potions for other potions/slimes/transformitive objects. You would earn the currency by playing and maybe it could be tied to the amount of witches you recruit into your Polycule.
Also those persistent transformative objects are really strong! any chance of allowing them to reduce in size each time a potion is cast?
ngl either I suck major ass, or is the mesmerizing potion kind of busted, shit ends runs. Especially if the opponent has the growth potion too. Cancer combo
Keeps crashing my cromebook. To be more specific the computer freezes up upon the godot loading screen finishing. In order to set my computer back to a useable state I had to reset it.
Genuinely a really addictive game! I admitadly probably suck as I can only get up to 6 witches, I often get stuck at the hypno potions.
If I would change anything it would be that, but honestly as a rouge lite this can get really addictive and would be fun as a full fledge game. Of things I would add which I'm not saying would make or break the game but would be fun and I only share, because its stuff I thought about while playing.
1.Allow the player to customize their witch based on the options available, since the main witches seem to be randomized from a pool of assets. even if limited to a few of the options would be a lot of fun to be like "hehe that me"
2.A few more options for what can be traded after a match, Even if say you need to use 2 potions to get 1 item in that trade, or even all 3 to get an OP ingredient all around would be fun, I half suggest this as RNG started giving me lower level stuff I could get by upgrading the 3 I had on hand.
3.Starter Bags, having the ability to chose from select "basic" potions or even having the ability to chose potions based on rank/value with a budgeting system. I mainly suggest this one as every time I Game overed starting over with the light blue size increasing potions just felt like a kick in the teeth, like having the option to start with some other low level potion or even fewer potions, but some low level strong ones.
My dumb ideas aside, really fun as a whole, glad I saw this game its really fun and I'm 100% sharing it with folks who I think would enjoy it.
Cool game, surprisingly deep and fun. I have never gotten past round 3 though, the opponents decks feel very ball-busting compared to starting with the expansion potion. Agree with other commenters that customizing the starting loadout and appearance would be very fun. And also the mesmerizing potion is broken (mechanically, very easy to lead to guaranteed backfires even though "it can't backfire").
day 15 waiting on an update: its been two weeks and im still hyped about this game getting an update. please take your time im just trying to be funny : 3
Not sure if this would damage the intended game but would it be possible to have hypnotic spirals be lost on a backfire? It feels like if you dont get a hypnotic spiral or a corrupting potion before the round with a witch that has it, its essentially a loss regardless of how you play, with 4 spirals every time you fill a potion you go -4 persistantly with no means of getting rid of them.
Possible suggestion Hypnotic spirals lost on backfire (HOWEVER) each one adds a +1 to a potions backfire effect, you will still lose if it gets out of hand, but you have an option to backfire yourself early and still get back in the game, vs stare down a death spiral (HURHURHUR) and begrudgingly restart
this game is seriously addicting, id love to see more TF visuals and some way to change what your starting kit is. id also personally love to see some form of meta-progression, as thats my favorite flavor of Roguelike
a long term goal of being able to customize your character instead of having one generated randomly for you would be nice. it can also tie in well when choosing a starting deck when that becomes available.
I've been having issues trying to run this on windows, it ends up taking a TON of CPU and Memory whenever it's open, and then the Godot Screen at te start never actually goes away, even though I can hear the sounds playing on the menu. I can't hear the menu options when thumbing over them, so I don't think I can interact at all with it.
No, but seriously. Great art and the gameplay is great too, keep up the great work!
Edit: Thought I should come back to give some explanation for what had happend in the video and some feedback.
It just looks like you can pretty much let every witch destroy herself by upgrading the expansion potion a lot. This also gets a lot worse if you keep on going.
Also I'd really love to get a gallery where you can see all the transformations you've already seen
I want to start off by saying hey, this game is really great and I'm very excited to play it! The gameplay is satisfying and challenging in a way that seems fair. If the current version was the final version, I'd be happy with it, and I am happy with it.
All that said, there's a couple things that I think could make it even better.
Number one, adding a one time use remove potion option to each rewards screen. Thinning is generally one of the most important things you can do in a game like this, and needing to upgrade a potion to tier V just to remove it is a little too much. One potion removed per shop would, IMO, make duplicating your potions a much more appealing choice since you won't eat tons of deck bloat.
Number two, relatedly, fix the bovine potions! At least in the version I'm playing (downloaded ~1 hour ago) they are PERMANENT deck-bloating negatives, not removed at end of round despite the "temporary" label. This combined with no "remove potion" option means facing them early is absolutely brutal.
The spirals and eggplants are also very strong when used by the opponent (as is charm) but they feel much less absurd because you can beat them by simply being faster, at least.
Finally, add a win screen! I saw you said it loops after 8, and I think it'd be awesome to have a quick "you rule the polycule" or whatever screen, with "return to menu" and "continue (endless)" buttons.
Like I said, this game is absolutely a blast, I've had great fun. I make these suggestions purely because I want something good to become even greater.
yeah, as it stands there are 8 rounds each with their own selection of (hopefully) progressively tougher witches, but after beating all 8 you wrap back around to round 1. Each time you wrap around, all witches will have a random number of potions in their concoction upgraded, to make them slightly tougher.
In theory you could reach a point where there's nothing left to upgrade, but I'm not sure how many rounds in you'd have to get to make that happen.
This game has a lot of potential and I'm looking forward to further development. However, in its current form there is a pretty game-breaking bug and some balance concerns.
Bugs: In every run that goes long or has a lot going on (corruption, hypnotic swirl, bulging) that I've had, there comes a point where my opponent's brew timer goes into the negatives. They cannot cast, and they cannot be defeated (their health goes into negatives). In one instance, I happened to overflow my brew accidentally with my opponent's pile going above the screen, and that caused to infinitely overflow and become unable to do anything about it. The only fix is to close the game and reopen it; quitting the run and starting a new one will keep the bug active.
I also got some weird effects when changing resolution, where the game refused to fill the screen and instead all I could do was click some very wrong button boxes. Restarting the game fixed it, and I haven't managed to reproduce it.
While we're at it, it seems that not defining the game's resolution at the beginning will keep it in a max graphics quality state where my computer will start burning up rather quickly. Perhaps setting a default windowed resolution on game open would fix this, or saving the setting somewhere?
Balance: It feels a bit like an overreach given I'm not the dev here and I apologize if it's uncalled for, but I'll leave some suggestions on how to fix these.
- Hypnotic swirl (& Eggplants): The swirl punishes you for cycling through brews quickly, but then it also makes it necessary to do so as it keeps filling your board; i.e. it punishes you for playing at all. They're quite large and with three of them on the opponent's side, they fill your board quite quickly and leave you helpless, making the only way to beat this build to either slow their brew like a madman, fill their brew with garbage first, or hit hard and fast (which won't happen early in a run and is the least likely of these strategies to work). It'd be an idea to make them single-use (in exchange for making them drop more swirls per potion and/or level), or otherwise make the swirls not permanent (in exchange for making them more powerful, as otherwise they might as well be allure potions). Another idea is to let them combine and dissolve into the background; still adding value to the opponent but not crippling the player entirely. Eggplants share a similar issue with being permanent, but don't punish you for actually playing the game which makes them a lot better to deal with, although they're still broken in the sense that they cripple your ability to play the game after some time.
- Bovine Bell & Milking Potion: This potion punishes you for not playing it and for playing it. I do like the idea of having garbage in your build, but punishing a player for getting punished doesn't seem right, or at least, not as hard as this does. Probably a good idea is to upgrade the potion already in deck instead of adding a new one? Otherwise making the milking potions not spawn more of them and instead making them considerably larger/increase the size of potions in your brew when combined could work. This still punishes the player in a similar manner, but it's much tamer.
- Yellow potions (reactive?): These seem good at a glance, but when you actually try them out, they're incredibly weak and you'd rather pick up an accelerant upgrade/potion. Having to combine them also makes them a bit rough to use. I'm not sure how to make these better, though, other than making them bigger or changing their trigger to not depend on combining.
- Potion distribution: This is particularly in regards to the Bovine Bell, but opponents with other single-use potions will see this issue as well. The milking potions are essentially garbage you have to lose a turn to get rid of, and bells being single use, means the opponent can just sift through a significantly more efficient deck with 3 less potions while you're stuck dealing with 3 useless potions. This is a very powerful effect on its own, but when combined with an opponent that otherwise only has accelerants and allure potions, makes for an opponent that can only be beat with permanent debuffs (filling their board with garbage), as they're too fast for you to do anything about it.
Besides that, getting interesting builds is pretty rewarding and I feel like the difficulty for building a deck is just right; I kinda wish you didn't have to break your loadout to fix it later though; that risk usually ends up in a dead run.
going to piggy back on a lot of what im seeing in the comments. the permanent/persistent potions (eggplant/hypno spyral) are insanely annoying to deal with on the receiving end, especially the enemy who does both + expansion potions. rather than nerfing them however, another option could be to include the corruption/conversion potions in the players starting deck. This would give the player some agency in dealing with them, while still leaving it as a viable strat for players to use.
In terms of progression i would love to see some more control in how we sculpt our run. some options being providing multiple options to transform potions into, an option to add a potion w/o needing to transform, being able to use potions from our deck (but still limit the uses of the upgrades to 3 per round), or being able to remove a potion entirely.
overall a very solid start and especially impressive given the time constraint of a game jam!
also i may have broken the game, game REALLY doesnt like it when something from an opponents flask makes it into your's, there is an ice slime in my flask that alone is big enough to cause a backfire (thank you way too many blue slime)
found that this also completely bricks the game, lets you start a new run, but the opponent couldnt resolve their flask, nor could they lose
After playing some more, expansion potions are absolutely useless against any opponent that has any kind of fast cycle gimmick i.e. lots of accelerants, and it's also terrible against any comp that has compression potions. both of these let the opponent either empty or shrink their cauldron faster than you can expand it, and I say this having managed to get a run with a level 5 expansion potion in deck and a pair of level 5 accelerants, you can't cycle fast enough to outpace any kind of enemy that has the above. I'm not sure how you would solve this without making expansion stronger vs enemies that have slow cycle/cast rates at the very least it would probably be nice to have the expansion scale more smoothly at higher sizes since it's very hard to maintain expansion at a threatening size; once you get really big the potions shrink by enough per turn that the extra space is enough for the new potion thrown in
Also will second the statement many others have made that the hypnotic swirls are absolutely overpowered, as they basically combine two powerful effects of permanent spacefilling (will eventually brick you due to no more space in the cauldron) and a constant allure drain with 0 counterplay. This makes it just a vastly better slime potion that kinda also has the effect of the allure potion. imo the hypnotic swirls need to either be not permanent or hypno potion needs to be replaced with a hypno item similar to the cowbell nerf.
another suggestion would be to allow the player to choose which 3 "special" potions they have instead of automatically giving them expansion potions, as this would make it a lot easier to try out different builds
This is a pretty fun game its just that it gets kinda frustrating to play when it's both hard to get a build going and most builds will get stonewalled by a handful of enemy comps anyway so why bother.
anyway compensatory bug report for complaints: not sure if this is intentional, but if you use the drain potion to get a high level potion in hand, and then end the battle, you can then use the dupe feature to get a copy of that potion at that level instead of it reverting to it's original level. IMO this is worth just making a feature because it gives the drain potion an extra use and helps to assemble builds for some of the potions that kinda suck and need high level versions to be effective (like the expansion potion).
also compression potion could probably do with an extra effect since as it stands I don't see a use outside of as a counter to an enemy with expansion or growth potions, and I'm not sure if the blueberry slime needs to compress on cast since I used it a bit to basically no effect
so, i did a run that big on huge expansion, to interesting results. i don't have a screenshot for it but one interesting issue was that with like 5 star sized blue potions cast all at once, the opponent's ingredients would shoot out of the pot. including into MY pot, causing an overflow. this was VERY surprising. also, at some point, the potions just wouldn't trigger at all. not at zero and not when overflowing. you can see it action here
also i can only be sure of the wandering slime moving between pots. i think i remember others doing the same, i'd have to try and recreate it. edit: no, it was more than the slime. backfired and shot a couple hypnodisks into the opponent's pot
So uhhh. This happened? For some reason theirs didn't cast when it got to zero and when I casted it didn't switch to next screen. Playing on win11 firefox
Fun game, but spirals are way too strong and I wish you could more easily control your build. I like the extra layer of tactics in wanting to have your "hand" have the potions you want to get rid of and/or upgrade, but its kinda annoying to manage ngl. it would be nice if you could swap at least one for a potion in your "deck" so that you can more easily tailor your builds. The ability to remove potions and slim down your deck would be nice as well.
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Game is amazing, i spent way to much time on it already xD
I love the concept of it but i really wish i could select my starting items, could be by unlocking new ones by playing or buying them in a shop or smthing similar ? Could add a small coins that you get after winning then you can buy the potions or items you want !! Otherwise the game is great, would definitely recommend ^w^
Amazing game. I would love to see different starting bags become available. I'm dead set on trying to make a more unique strategy work. Still, every time I try to go for anything that is too far from the basic allure potion plan, I lose too quickly before I even get any kind of new synergy between my potions going.
(A hopefully easy-to-implement idea for this could be to choose a starting bag from one of the witches you encounter.)
Got a bug to report, not sure if it's an issue on my end or maybe godot but I might as well
So, I decided to download the game both on the itch io app and using my browser, and both times after it got past the godot loading screen, all i would see is a nlack screen with little black squares that were blinking rapidly, there was noise but other than that I couldn't click anything or do anything, however for some reason i can play it on my browser so I'm not sure what's going on there.
I love this game. The witches are cute and the gameplay has me hooked!
My main complaint is that the game has a tendency to softlock, especially common when coolant or viscous is in play (things that change the cast time.) It can throw the game into a broken state where casting potions doesn't work and nobody can win or lose regardless of sub-zero allure.
There's also a bug with expansion elixir in tier 5/6. If ingredients grow too large, they can spill out of the pot into the other player's, even potentially cause the other player to overflow. Maybe there should be a maximum size for ingredients to grow to?
Also, even after the nerfs, bovine elixir is super oppressive. Maybe casting a bovine elixir could downgrade it once or remove it from the bag? Maybe corruption elixir could remove it from the bag after converting it?
Does or will this have sex scenes?
not currently
not opposed to the idea in future, but I don't really consider it a priority. my focus is on erotic stuff that coincides with the gameplay
Seems to be majorly unstable. I’ve only gotten it to run once. Every other time, the window either doesn’t appear at all, I get stuck on a solid grey screen with sound, it never goes past the Godot logo, or it crashes on the godot logo.
EDIT: So, I watched this in Process Monitor, and when it fails to load, it’s constantly opening “Potions and Polycules.pck”, reading 512 bytes at offset 202,237,062, 4,096 bytes at 384,490,080, 202,236,720, and 384,493,728, and closing it, followed by failed attempts to open \scripts\particles\bubble_particle.gdc.import, over and over again.
At one point, it also wrote a lot to the log file, which led to me check it, and I found it full of this error:
EDIT2: Ran it from the console with –verbose, and yeah, when it hangs, it’s constantly searching for that bubble_particle file.
Realistically, this means it probably shouldn’t have run that one time at all, so IDK.
EDIT3: Here’s the full log from that verbose run. https://0.0g.gg/?710cae9b593b66db#3AdRgwaWBqtoA6AB5op7eLvBCoATtaysa7K5zPDDii6f
hmm, interesting
I'm afraid this is one of those 'works on my machine' type problems that're tricky to track down, so thankyou very much for the detailed bug report
I'm currently working on an update that, among other things, ports the project to the latest stable Godot release which with any luck should improve stability - but I will investigate if there's anything funky going on with the bubble particle prefab.
It would be nice if you could customize the witch you play as instead of leaving it at random. Still, amazing game, been playing for hours and I can't stop!
Super addicted to what little I can manage to play. Even if it takes me 30mins to get a handful in the polycule, I can't stop going back to try again! Sadly 70% of my runs end thanks to a crash.
I particularly enjoyed the 'send to opponent' type effects. I'm a little iffy on the slime ones as they merge very easily and they don't tend to have any effect at the 6* potency since...they're supposed to take up cauldron space not sit in the infinite liquid state! Would recommend that they 'revert' to solid on cast, so that they go back into the cauldron instead of disappearing. At least for the ones that are meant to be thrown at the opponent. Would be a great way to make use of the opponent's liquid mechanic if you filled it up and the moment they cast they're hit with a wall of slime! Maybe a slime that cleans the opponent's slime on infusion but deals allure based on their slime potency at cast.
edit:Wow this ended up as a wall of text and a half! TLDR; Lots of troubleshooting to find out my pc is officially potato and to fix that would require gambling on bsod, and that's just to fix whatever the debugger wants not what the game demands.
I can only guess that my gpu is barely strong enough to play the game but only marginally and any performance humps means a crash. So essentially, I can only ask for better optimization if I want to actually play.
I found out exactly how outdated my pc is because of this game haha! All the debugging told me that I really really needed to update my graphics driver...only it took me a couple days of troubleshooting to find out that my pc has a manufacturer lock on it's drivers and they stopped supporting my pc years before even intel stopped as well. I found out I can 'unlock' it by reverting first and then using external programs/tools and make it update towards intel's drivers(which has a community that recently put out a new update), but that comes with the bsod risks, don't know if this game is worth bricking my computer...it's real close though~~! I also think the error code is the debugger failing and not what actually crashed the game since it won't stop trying to access debug files for drivers that don't want to be debugged and the community is only as helpful as 'ignore that as the developer'. It wasn't a waste of time though, I at least found some updates for other drivers that couldn't be found automatically by windows. In the process of all that I found out my calculator was corrupted...somehow, and it was the pebble in the cog stopping the 'final' windows update from going through, that took a full day of troubleshooting to fix. Managed to update everything as much as possible and cleaned up tons of clutter. So yay for a slightly faster pc experience...even if it had zero impact on my gaming experience. I can now use my browser at normal speeds even under slightly above average throughput!
The problems I'm facing thus can't rely on the debug logs, and I'll just do it old school via guestimation!
During launch is most likely the more common performance issues. It's just my pc has potato gpu so frame drops during preloading become game breaking instead. Pretty sure what's crashing me on launch is the wavy texture plus the front heavy loading. When the wavy font moves around by going through the different menus it does a decent sized frame stutter. I can see it being a draw on the system through the tutorial with it's moving boxes of texts.
Then what crashes mid game seems to be a combination of different entity updates like honey blocks detecting if it hit another honey block but it'll crash if it checks at the wrong time. Game also really hates when I hold a potion whilst the opponent is casting, or hover descriptions, or hover over refresh. This one's usually ok early on but the more potions out the worse it becomes, and especially so the bigger the polycule count as if the cache is being filled with prior rounds. Maybe some potions or sprite transformations data aren't being erased?
I've found the honey block and sprials to be particularly heavy on my pc. There's also the milk transformation, but that depends on the sprite being effected for some reason. Some sprites really don't like the milk, like instant crash even on the first step of milkers. On that note some sprites improve my performance quite a bit so sometimes I reroll just for my witch to be one of them. Weirdly they can tank the effects well enough that would slow or even crash other ones.
huge respect for your troubleshooting skills 🙏
I'll see if I can use some of this information to optomise the game a lil further, but I won't lie - I don't really know how much of this I really have the power to fix
The troubleshooting was mostly just sifting through useless guides/Q&As. Also because every source on my pc's spec was vague about the graphics name/spec/gen, I still don't actually know since it's 1 of 3 very different ones and I just used the archived manufacturer files that encompassed the whole pc build. Though thank the heavens for some random guy who gave succinct cmd prompt lines which fixed dism/cbs before attempting to fix the pc.
The launch bug...not much since that's just potato intel graphics, but maybe add a persistent and more thorough settings menu. The game always opens at max resolution, and it'd be nice to be able to tone down the particle effects and animations like bubbles, spirals, and such. The reduced particle effect could just be a singular bubble that expands briefly before popping, lots of entities spawning and erasing is a breeding ground for some to become permanent if the process gets interrupted. The wavy text is probably the easiest to turn off, which I'm sure is why hover descriptions add so much strain. Don't know why hovering on the refresh does, maybe because of the little animation it does? Holding potions is more a physics problem which is...a huge ask to optimize to say it lightly! A more specific ask would be a 'clear effects' button in the pause menu, since sometimes a transformation is applied poorly and the game really struggles from after that. Which gets cleaned a bit after clearing the level, but there's a subtle change in the minimum strain from then on. The spirals only really become a problem because...they're kind of op and you're more likely to have at least half your pot filled with a dozen or more of them before you clear the level. So the shear quantity of spirals become a problem when they all individually spin.
Another optimization is to put all the transformations into a buffer zone. Like a 'combo' counter or something where it'll hold all the effects until after the potions settle down, then applies it either sequentially or at once depending on how the coding handles transformation. Though if you go that route, you'd also have to include an after battle break so that we can actually admire the sprite's transformations since it currently skips straight to the 'shop' menu upon winning. The shop is also a great point in time to clear up the cache a bit and should overall keep the performance in peak condition throughout a run. Stuff like double checking if all the potions and transformation have been cleared, as well as freeing up prior sprites from remaining cached since it'd be rare to get identical sprites. It'll add a loading time, but it'd also speed up the game.
I'm also going out on a limb and guessing that the honey block has extra/redundant checks since the other slime blocks don't crash my game. Honey will crash my game if it collides with something at heavy strain moments, even if it's not the honey block being dropped in. Probably not much of a difference for others, but when you're already throttling the line even slight spikes become more obvious.
I've been really enjoying this! Now I just need to get good enough to actually play with all the potion types :p
Excellent work!
I really enjoyed the game, thank you for making it! I really liked looking at the various TFs and their progression.
I also like how there's a bit of real-time elements, so you can do things like try to save your pot from backfiring by causing it to brew first, or save yourself from hitting 0 allure by brewing something while the allure is ticking down.
I seem to have found a good strategy for winning fights:
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As fast as you can, put 3-4 Lv5 Expansion potions and then Brew the pot, using rerolls as necessary to force the ingredients to show up. Ideally you'd splash 1-2 eggplant or Hypno potions in there as well to force a backfire, but they aren't completely necessary.
After brewing the other side's pot's ingredients should expand and cause a backfire. From then on you keep piling on expansion to maintain the large ingredient size while doing other stuff and then win since you're doing stuff and they are not.
Could you please add a save run button. It would be really nice to be able to resume your run
oh that's 100% a quality of life feature I'd like to add sooner or later
hey, i really lijke the game could you add FMG?
FMG?
oh, well it's in short female muscles growth
ohhh
muscles are generally a little outside of my wheelhouse, but I'll certainly bare it in mind
This game is really well made. Any thoughts in creating an in game store to let the player buy different potions to start with?
I would love to be able to experience all of what this game has to offer without needing to rely on RNG.
An example store could be something like spend a in game currency that lets you trade your starting potions for other potions/slimes/transformitive objects. You would earn the currency by playing and maybe it could be tied to the amount of witches you recruit into your Polycule.
Also those persistent transformative objects are really strong! any chance of allowing them to reduce in size each time a potion is cast?
ngl either I suck major ass, or is the mesmerizing potion kind of busted, shit ends runs. Especially if the opponent has the growth potion too. Cancer combo
One of the most enjoyable adult games i've played, begging for it to get updated
growth potion should make the character taller
I second this, and I think compression potions should make them smaller.
Keeps crashing my cromebook. To be more specific the computer freezes up upon the godot loading screen finishing. In order to set my computer back to a useable state I had to reset it.
Any chance to get it playable on mobile?
It's something I'd like to look into, though it's probably a fair ways off for the time being - I don't have a super good phone to test it on rn.
gosh... When you catch you it's done
I managed to get up to round 32 just using the main 3 potions and a lot of upgrades.
I only lose because I backfired myself by accident...
Genuinely a really addictive game! I admitadly probably suck as I can only get up to 6 witches, I often get stuck at the hypno potions.
If I would change anything it would be that, but honestly as a rouge lite this can get really addictive and would be fun as a full fledge game.
Of things I would add which I'm not saying would make or break the game but would be fun and I only share, because its stuff I thought about while playing.
1.Allow the player to customize their witch based on the options available, since the main witches seem to be randomized from a pool of assets. even if limited to a few of the options would be a lot of fun to be like "hehe that me"
2.A few more options for what can be traded after a match, Even if say you need to use 2 potions to get 1 item in that trade, or even all 3 to get an OP ingredient all around would be fun, I half suggest this as RNG started giving me lower level stuff I could get by upgrading the 3 I had on hand.
3.Starter Bags, having the ability to chose from select "basic" potions or even having the ability to chose potions based on rank/value with a budgeting system. I mainly suggest this one as every time I Game overed starting over with the light blue size increasing potions just felt like a kick in the teeth, like having the option to start with some other low level potion or even fewer potions, but some low level strong ones.
My dumb ideas aside, really fun as a whole, glad I saw this game its really fun and I'm 100% sharing it with folks who I think would enjoy it.
How the hell are you supposed to counter hypnosis?
corruption elixir, compression elixir, and coolant slime all work really well against the spirals, at least from my experience
Cool game, surprisingly deep and fun. I have never gotten past round 3 though, the opponents decks feel very ball-busting compared to starting with the expansion potion. Agree with other commenters that customizing the starting loadout and appearance would be very fun. And also the mesmerizing potion is broken (mechanically, very easy to lead to guaranteed backfires even though "it can't backfire").
fr. mesmerizing and growth is an insane combo.
day 15 waiting on an update: its been two weeks and im still hyped about this game getting an update. please take your time im just trying to be funny : 3
this looks fun but won’t load on mobile
Is there an exe. file in there?
Because it won't run on mobile. If it's html., Joiplay might work.
Not sure if this would damage the intended game but would it be possible to have hypnotic spirals be lost on a backfire? It feels like if you dont get a hypnotic spiral or a corrupting potion before the round with a witch that has it, its essentially a loss regardless of how you play, with 4 spirals every time you fill a potion you go -4 persistantly with no means of getting rid of them.
Possible suggestion
Hypnotic spirals lost on backfire
(HOWEVER) each one adds a +1 to a potions backfire effect, you will still lose if it gets out of hand, but you have an option to backfire yourself early and still get back in the game, vs stare down a death spiral (HURHURHUR) and begrudgingly restart
Looks good
this game is seriously addicting, id love to see more TF visuals and some way to change what your starting kit is. id also personally love to see some form of meta-progression, as thats my favorite flavor of Roguelike
a long term goal of being able to customize your character instead of having one generated randomly for you would be nice. it can also tie in well when choosing a starting deck when that becomes available.
I've been having issues trying to run this on windows, it ends up taking a TON of CPU and Memory whenever it's open, and then the Godot Screen at te start never actually goes away, even though I can hear the sounds playing on the menu. I can't hear the menu options when thumbing over them, so I don't think I can interact at all with it.
I have the same problem on firefox on linux
Nice game! :D
https://imgur.com/a/ttHUwou
No, but seriously. Great art and the gameplay is great too, keep up the great work!
Edit: Thought I should come back to give some explanation for what had happend in the video and some feedback.
It just looks like you can pretty much let every witch destroy herself by upgrading the expansion potion a lot. This also gets a lot worse if you keep on going.
Also I'd really love to get a gallery where you can see all the transformations you've already seen
I want to start off by saying hey, this game is really great and I'm very excited to play it! The gameplay is satisfying and challenging in a way that seems fair. If the current version was the final version, I'd be happy with it, and I am happy with it.
All that said, there's a couple things that I think could make it even better.
Number one, adding a one time use remove potion option to each rewards screen. Thinning is generally one of the most important things you can do in a game like this, and needing to upgrade a potion to tier V just to remove it is a little too much. One potion removed per shop would, IMO, make duplicating your potions a much more appealing choice since you won't eat tons of deck bloat.
Number two, relatedly, fix the bovine potions! At least in the version I'm playing (downloaded ~1 hour ago) they are PERMANENT deck-bloating negatives, not removed at end of round despite the "temporary" label. This combined with no "remove potion" option means facing them early is absolutely brutal.
The spirals and eggplants are also very strong when used by the opponent (as is charm) but they feel much less absurd because you can beat them by simply being faster, at least.
Finally, add a win screen! I saw you said it loops after 8, and I think it'd be awesome to have a quick "you rule the polycule" or whatever screen, with "return to menu" and "continue (endless)" buttons.
Like I said, this game is absolutely a blast, I've had great fun. I make these suggestions purely because I want something good to become even greater.
does this have an upper limit? I got to 24
yeah, as it stands there are 8 rounds each with their own selection of (hopefully) progressively tougher witches, but after beating all 8 you wrap back around to round 1. Each time you wrap around, all witches will have a random number of potions in their concoction upgraded, to make them slightly tougher.
In theory you could reach a point where there's nothing left to upgrade, but I'm not sure how many rounds in you'd have to get to make that happen.
This game has a lot of potential and I'm looking forward to further development. However, in its current form there is a pretty game-breaking bug and some balance concerns.
Bugs:
In every run that goes long or has a lot going on (corruption, hypnotic swirl, bulging) that I've had, there comes a point where my opponent's brew timer goes into the negatives. They cannot cast, and they cannot be defeated (their health goes into negatives). In one instance, I happened to overflow my brew accidentally with my opponent's pile going above the screen, and that caused to infinitely overflow and become unable to do anything about it. The only fix is to close the game and reopen it; quitting the run and starting a new one will keep the bug active.
I also got some weird effects when changing resolution, where the game refused to fill the screen and instead all I could do was click some very wrong button boxes. Restarting the game fixed it, and I haven't managed to reproduce it.
While we're at it, it seems that not defining the game's resolution at the beginning will keep it in a max graphics quality state where my computer will start burning up rather quickly. Perhaps setting a default windowed resolution on game open would fix this, or saving the setting somewhere?
Balance:
It feels a bit like an overreach given I'm not the dev here and I apologize if it's uncalled for, but I'll leave some suggestions on how to fix these.
- Hypnotic swirl (& Eggplants): The swirl punishes you for cycling through brews quickly, but then it also makes it necessary to do so as it keeps filling your board; i.e. it punishes you for playing at all. They're quite large and with three of them on the opponent's side, they fill your board quite quickly and leave you helpless, making the only way to beat this build to either slow their brew like a madman, fill their brew with garbage first, or hit hard and fast (which won't happen early in a run and is the least likely of these strategies to work).
It'd be an idea to make them single-use (in exchange for making them drop more swirls per potion and/or level), or otherwise make the swirls not permanent (in exchange for making them more powerful, as otherwise they might as well be allure potions). Another idea is to let them combine and dissolve into the background; still adding value to the opponent but not crippling the player entirely. Eggplants share a similar issue with being permanent, but don't punish you for actually playing the game which makes them a lot better to deal with, although they're still broken in the sense that they cripple your ability to play the game after some time.
- Bovine Bell & Milking Potion: This potion punishes you for not playing it and for playing it. I do like the idea of having garbage in your build, but punishing a player for getting punished doesn't seem right, or at least, not as hard as this does. Probably a good idea is to upgrade the potion already in deck instead of adding a new one? Otherwise making the milking potions not spawn more of them and instead making them considerably larger/increase the size of potions in your brew when combined could work. This still punishes the player in a similar manner, but it's much tamer.
- Yellow potions (reactive?): These seem good at a glance, but when you actually try them out, they're incredibly weak and you'd rather pick up an accelerant upgrade/potion. Having to combine them also makes them a bit rough to use. I'm not sure how to make these better, though, other than making them bigger or changing their trigger to not depend on combining.
- Potion distribution: This is particularly in regards to the Bovine Bell, but opponents with other single-use potions will see this issue as well. The milking potions are essentially garbage you have to lose a turn to get rid of, and bells being single use, means the opponent can just sift through a significantly more efficient deck with 3 less potions while you're stuck dealing with 3 useless potions. This is a very powerful effect on its own, but when combined with an opponent that otherwise only has accelerants and allure potions, makes for an opponent that can only be beat with permanent debuffs (filling their board with garbage), as they're too fast for you to do anything about it.
Besides that, getting interesting builds is pretty rewarding and I feel like the difficulty for building a deck is just right; I kinda wish you didn't have to break your loadout to fix it later though; that risk usually ends up in a dead run.
going to piggy back on a lot of what im seeing in the comments. the permanent/persistent potions (eggplant/hypno spyral) are insanely annoying to deal with on the receiving end, especially the enemy who does both + expansion potions. rather than nerfing them however, another option could be to include the corruption/conversion potions in the players starting deck. This would give the player some agency in dealing with them, while still leaving it as a viable strat for players to use.
In terms of progression i would love to see some more control in how we sculpt our run. some options being providing multiple options to transform potions into, an option to add a potion w/o needing to transform, being able to use potions from our deck (but still limit the uses of the upgrades to 3 per round), or being able to remove a potion entirely.
overall a very solid start and especially impressive given the time constraint of a game jam!
also i may have broken the game, game REALLY doesnt like it when something from an opponents flask makes it into your's, there is an ice slime in my flask that alone is big enough to cause a backfire (thank you way too many blue slime)
found that this also completely bricks the game, lets you start a new run, but the opponent couldnt resolve their flask, nor could they lose
After playing some more, expansion potions are absolutely useless against any opponent that has any kind of fast cycle gimmick i.e. lots of accelerants, and it's also terrible against any comp that has compression potions. both of these let the opponent either empty or shrink their cauldron faster than you can expand it, and I say this having managed to get a run with a level 5 expansion potion in deck and a pair of level 5 accelerants, you can't cycle fast enough to outpace any kind of enemy that has the above. I'm not sure how you would solve this without making expansion stronger vs enemies that have slow cycle/cast rates at the very least it would probably be nice to have the expansion scale more smoothly at higher sizes since it's very hard to maintain expansion at a threatening size; once you get really big the potions shrink by enough per turn that the extra space is enough for the new potion thrown in
Also will second the statement many others have made that the hypnotic swirls are absolutely overpowered, as they basically combine two powerful effects of permanent spacefilling (will eventually brick you due to no more space in the cauldron) and a constant allure drain with 0 counterplay. This makes it just a vastly better slime potion that kinda also has the effect of the allure potion. imo the hypnotic swirls need to either be not permanent or hypno potion needs to be replaced with a hypno item similar to the cowbell nerf.
another suggestion would be to allow the player to choose which 3 "special" potions they have instead of automatically giving them expansion potions, as this would make it a lot easier to try out different builds
This is a pretty fun game its just that it gets kinda frustrating to play when it's both hard to get a build going and most builds will get stonewalled by a handful of enemy comps anyway so why bother.
anyway compensatory bug report for complaints: not sure if this is intentional, but if you use the drain potion to get a high level potion in hand, and then end the battle, you can then use the dupe feature to get a copy of that potion at that level instead of it reverting to it's original level. IMO this is worth just making a feature because it gives the drain potion an extra use and helps to assemble builds for some of the potions that kinda suck and need high level versions to be effective (like the expansion potion).
also compression potion could probably do with an extra effect since as it stands I don't see a use outside of as a counter to an enemy with expansion or growth potions, and I'm not sure if the blueberry slime needs to compress on cast since I used it a bit to basically no effect
absolutely adore this game! also i broke it in an interesting way if you want info about it :3
oh please do share! Love hearing what builds folks have come up with (or potentially what bugs they've found)
so, i did a run that big on huge expansion, to interesting results. i don't have a screenshot for it but one interesting issue was that with like 5 star sized blue potions cast all at once, the opponent's ingredients would shoot out of the pot. including into MY pot, causing an overflow. this was VERY surprising. also, at some point, the potions just wouldn't trigger at all. not at zero and not when overflowing. you can see it action here
also i can only be sure of the wandering slime moving between pots. i think i remember others doing the same, i'd have to try and recreate it.
edit: no, it was more than the slime. backfired and shot a couple hypnodisks into the opponent's pot
Thankyou for the bug report! A few folks have encountered this issue - I will be investigating the cause for the post-jam update I'm working on
if you survive past 100 rounds, the NPC should "collapse from exhaustion" or something and you auto win to prevent Softlocks
Also the game needs more player choice, The RNG very frequently puts the player in unwinnable scenarios
cant wait for the next update :
Fun game, but spirals are way too strong and I wish you could more easily control your build. I like the extra layer of tactics in wanting to have your "hand" have the potions you want to get rid of and/or upgrade, but its kinda annoying to manage ngl. it would be nice if you could swap at least one for a potion in your "deck" so that you can more easily tailor your builds. The ability to remove potions and slim down your deck would be nice as well.