Ordinary Wizards Doing Ordinary Things

Click here to play!

​You wanna be a wizard?! In _today's economy?!_

​Ordinary Wizards Doing Ordinary Things is a short and quirky real-time strategy game where you conduct an army of wizards around town to do everyday errands. The summoner becomes the summoned!

Unlock and complete all the gigs to satisfy the king and win the game! But watch out for the despicable DDDDD (Dastardly Demons Doing Devilish Deeds): they will show up uninvited and wreck your day.

Instructions

​(The instructions are in-game, so you don't need to read this)

- Hold the middle mouse button or space bar to pan the camera.
- Right click a target to select it.
- Left click a target to send a wizard from the selected target there.
- Targets will periodically have jobs available. Wizards in a target will perform the job automatically every second. The more wizards doing a job, the faster it gets done.
- Completing jobs gives you money. Click the wizard hat to buy more wizards for 3$ each.
- If you let a job go unattended for too long, it will expire and you'll lose a life. Lose all 3 and it's game over.
- Every once in a while, your tower will be attacked by demons. They will kill one of your wizards for every second they are alive. Send wizards to the tower to attack the demons. If you lose all your wizards, and don't have money to buy more, it's game over.
- To win, unlock the final gig - the trophy - and complete it.

Credits

- Code and art by Fupicat
- Music and sounds by pioner.py
- Public domain sounds were also used

What I learned

- This is definitely the most mechanics I've ever needed to code for a jam project, and I'm really happy that the coding process went so smoothly! Helped me prove to myself that I am actually improving with each game I make.
- Making graphics takes up a non-insignificant amount of time, even if I make the art-style as deliberately crappy as possible. My last day was basically all spent on the art. I should work with artists more often!
- Squash and stretch is fun.
- I should plan the content of the game *earlier* in the process. Last jam, I planned the entire story and then coded mechanics around it, which made the whole game a lot more cohesive. This time, I coded the mechanics and worried about creating the content later, which left me with some confusing design decisions. For example, the trophy being off-screen. The game was originally going to be much more zoomed in (you can still zoom the camera by scrolling) and part of the challenge was gonna be maneuvering the camera around. However, while actually playing the game with all the content, I found out that moving the camera so frequently caused lots of cramping, and was just tedious. It was also hard to know where there were jobs to do, and I couldn't figure out how to make the warning signs follow the edges of the camera to point to where they are. So, last minute, I decided to just zoom the camera out. The trophy, however, didn't fit on the screen, so it had to be left there.
- I shouldn't sacrifice intuitive controls to make something that feels better for me, subjectively. Left click to select and right click to move would have been fine, better even, since it's what people expect.

Thank you Tai for this image!!