Summoning Guidebook
Summoning Guidebook is a puzzle game where you have to figure out the recipe of each summonable object and creature. A guiding book will assist you by displaying how each item you tribute during the ritual changes the summoning's direction.
Learning how each item affects the ritual will help you figure out the correct tribute combinations/recipes, and allow you to summon the grand prize!
Notes: based on personal experience from playtesting it last day (didn't have much time left), and also from feedback, I understand that a certain part of the game is a bit grindier than I wanted it to be, and also that the usage of the knife is quite janky. I'm extending this game to a full game (will start from a blank project to make the code more maintainable), and these are issues I've already figured out solutions to, along with other QoL changes. Thank you everyone for the feedback, it really helped me realize how much that certain part of the game can be discouraging for the player!
Learning how each item affects the ritual will help you figure out the correct tribute combinations/recipes, and allow you to summon the grand prize!
Notes: based on personal experience from playtesting it last day (didn't have much time left), and also from feedback, I understand that a certain part of the game is a bit grindier than I wanted it to be, and also that the usage of the knife is quite janky. I'm extending this game to a full game (will start from a blank project to make the code more maintainable), and these are issues I've already figured out solutions to, along with other QoL changes. Thank you everyone for the feedback, it really helped me realize how much that certain part of the game can be discouraging for the player!
Comments53
@kaliuresis Congrats on summoning the pickles! I actually didn't know about the diagonal sprinting, that's an interesting find, seems like it's an accidental feature. I think you used the knife properly, it's meant to be used by just touching things with the blade while holding it.
@projesh Glad you enjoyed the experience this way! I originally had the "hints" part when you open the menu display some sort of directions, but I couldn't make it in a way that wouldn't give away too much and I felt it would take away from the game. So I'm glad you enjoyed the exploration without handholding! And yeah, the knife may not be the most intuitive, but once you understand how it works, it's funny to kill bats with while standing still.
The only thing I'd like to critisize is the knife, because to me, it felt weird to use and I also felt that there aren't many use cases for it.
Other than that, your game was really good! Well done!
@denkithegamer Congrats on getting the pickles, and glad you enjoyed the experimentation aspect of it! The knife was kind of a struggle, at first I wanted to add stabbing to the game, but the animations kept completely messing up and we were running out of time, so we settled for worse knife mechanics to polish other aspects of the game. It was mainly to make killing the bats easier, as you don't have to aim the rock if you use the knife. But I agree, knife would definitely be the thing I'd rework if I had more time.
Great submission!
Clever srafting system.
Hunting bats was tedious. Maybe allowing player to kill many bats with one stone could improve that?
Nice graphic. Overall great entry!
@cmakota Yeah, the movement I would definitely rework when polishing this game. To start out I just needed a simple movement script, and it didn't feel it would've been worth putting more effort towards improving the movement when the deadline was soo tight.
@jack-bingham I agree, and other have pointed out the knife having awful mechanics. It was in the list of planned improvements for the game, but other things had higher priority, and we ran out of time before being able to fix the knife.
@oznarox You can throw the rocks and kill animals with it, then use those for summoning!
@captainspacecat Glad you enjoyed the game! I was also thinking of items as vectors while making it. Enjoy the pickles!
@vodzik With the knife if you stand in a spot, you can actually have bats just fly into the knife and farm them that way. But I agree, I was thinking of adding a feature to be able to grab bats by hand, but the short jam time made it so that our code was complete spaghetti and such a basic thing would've been a pain to implement with our code structure.
Overall, well done!
@human-writes-code Have you been playing it in the browser? From what I've noticed, the browser version has way higher mouse sensitivity, even though they're built from the exact same project.
And thank you for the feedback! I was planning on extending it and polishing it after the jam, and more feedback to the user was planned (showing the vector of the X's movement, having an actual grid and displaying object's values, and recipes saving in the book so you can look them up). So it was definitely something I was considering, the time just didn't allow for that.
Murdering bats with rocks was a bit tedious. The knife mechanics were unclear, but I eventually found a spot in the cave where you can just jump on the spot and they fly into the knife. You need a lot of bats.
I now have pickles!
When I understood the several slot system, I felt even more stupid.
Really, the game is good. The puzzle is really clever.
Hail the Pickles!
Like I said on stream, I had a lot of fun solving the puzzles once I figured out the mechanics (and I totally should have read the screenshots to figure them out sooner 😅). My main feedback was something that you already knew (based on the description) - It can get a bit grindy to gather the resources that you need to solve the puzzles, and it would have been nice to reduce the time between the eureka moment when you solve the puzzle, and the actual implementation of the solution. You had some good ideas for how to reduce that friction in later builds though!
Overall, this was a cool entry with a really unique idea main mechanic, and just needs some extra quality of life polish to make it more approachable - *Really* great job for a first time jam game 😊
@smidgens Thank you for the feedback! About the graphics, I started learning modelling and blender just 3 days before the jam, so honestly low poly is pretty much all I could do in a timely manner, but I'm glad it turned out well! I do have some methods planned to make the game less grindy, unfortunately I didn't have the time to rebalance the game before the deadline.