Pelmeni's Magic Lab

Honestly, I got a bit overwhelmed by... well, everything.
It’s supposed to be fun, but the inputs feel uncomfortable, and there’s too much information - TL;DR, I didn’t understand much, filled the field randomly, and somehow won.

I love the graphics though — the pixel art is really stylish!
A decent start overall, keep it up, and I wish you the best

This was very fun! I definitely felt overloaded by information when I first started the game (for example, I had *no* idea what was going on when I was drafting sets to start the game), but I quickly picked things up and figured out what was going on - It might be a good idea to add a key to your description page giving folks a primer if they need it!

My only other piece of feedback is that I had a hard time remembering which tiles belonged to which set based solely on background color - I knew which tiles matched each other, but I had no idea (for example) which tiles belonged to the holy or warlock sets, when they were being referenced on other tiles

Overall though, this was a very cool game, and those are minor UI nitpicks that can easily be solved!

I really like the idea! I feel like I cheesed the game a bit on my first run - had the option to take the cleric set 3 times, and very quickly was placing rooms for free after that, but really neat puzzle game, would love to play a deeper version if you ever make one! The only real issues I had were UI related like the other comments listed, but it was fun figuring out the strategy

Love the game art! I tries many times and still have to optimize options!

The art is really good and the game feels very polished, but as others have said, the game overloads you with too much info at a time, and I don't think more text would solve this. The concept is really fun, but I think you'd need to introduce the player little by little to all of the mechanics.

The graphics & UI look amazing, but the controls and game-mechanics overwhelmed me a bit. I think if you would scope it down to make it very simple, or a tutorial that guides you through it at first, you would help onboard players :)

It's a very beautiful and interesting game. I really like pixel art and this kind of puzzles.

This has gorgeous pixel art and a perfect color palette. Also, interesting use of a deck builder to go with the collector theme. I like your style and taste in video games. =)

Nice! After a few tries, for some reason here, I managed to win...

Something is a bit off here. I only had artificer and dining sets and placing the warlock dupe tile as green somehow allowed me to win. It's quite unclear what a set is...

It front loads waaaay too much information on the player at the beginning without knowing anything and even requires you to make a choice for your deck. That's just way too much and for several runs I pretty much just chose randomly at the start. Having like a random or "starter friendly" deck on your first run might be better. Like the influence here, Blue Prince, does it very slowly introducing more and more cards making you ease in to the complexity. Not just throwing everything at you at once. And here the interactions are actually even deeper than in BP.

I kinda played without using redraws at all. I pretty much just used when I was getting stuck otherwise which on hindsight wasn't that smart. I guess you could really plan out your deck and fish for some efficient building orders for an easy win but doubt anyone has that sort of deep knowledge of all the cards besides you as the dev.

Still quite not sure why sometimes I was discarding my hand and sometimes not. Don't think I placed any tiles that triggered such effect either. But quite a lot of time I couldn't be sure if I'd be able to play more than one card from my hand.

It's kinda weird and restricting that you can't place doorways towards the outer walls but can still point towards another tile without a door.

Would have been super nice to see the tile cost manipulations shown a bit. And even have the manipulated costs (the ones that come from other places than selected ranks) show up before picking the card up too. Also lasting effects like that one warlock card making the next 3 tiles free and being able to see how many freebies are still left.

Very nice pixel art with awesome color palette! The font wasn't the easiest of things ever to read but I guess that wasn't that much of an issue. And of course music and some sweet sound effects would have really made the experience much better.

And finally, I think that it would have played much nicer with mouse controls instead of keys.

Oh and I guess it wasn't the final thing. The game kinda breaks if you run out of tiles in your deck. Nothing major though as I guess the game is over there anyway and it doesn't like fully break and stop you from restarting. And why do I have 12 mana there? Can the crystal ritual thing put you above the max?

Anyways, good job! 👍

@antti-haavikko thanks for the thorough feedback! I think you ended up at 12 mana because:
- Mirror of Judgement makes you lose 1 mana capacity for every Necromancer or Warlock (grey checkered and red triangle) room that's been placed.
- Beginner Mage set (blue striped rooms) gives you +4 mana capacity on completion.

So based on the board, you likely went from 10 -> 8 -> 12 mana capacity

On the first board you posted, this is a visual issue with the colors of the Necromancy (grey) set. It looks like you have that set complete (skull room, sewing room, graveyard), but the indicator is really hard to notice. I changed the background color of the game last minute and didn't have time to fix this issue, unfortunately. Here's an up close to show what I mean, though it's really hard to tell if you're not looking for it:

empty	completed

On a few of your other points:
- After placement, you always discard the rest of your hand, unless you have the Ingredient Storage room which lets you retain the first card in your hand
- Overloading on info: yeahh, almost all the comments mention being overloaded or overwhelmed. It's definitely a problem. I got a bit greedy on spending time making cards and ended up running out of time to work on UI/tutorial/pacing. One of the biggest issues I didn't even consider was that the game doesn't make it clear what a set, or completing a set, actually means. I had a few friends playtest this game in person after the jam and it made me realize how confusing it is to tell what's going on in the game.
- For redraws: the overall balance of the game right now is a bit too easy. As a result, you don't really need to use the redraw. After the jam, I made a version that tweaked the costs to be a bit higher, and I found myself relying on redraws way more.

Agree with you that it's a bit restrictive that you can't place doors towards the outer walls. Originally I was just mimicking blue prince on this, but I think it doesn't work well with my room-drawing/placement structure.

Thanks for playing!

Also, a few people have commented on the colors. Updated the credits to include that I used this palette: https://lospec.com/palette-list/apollo

I enjoyed playing this puzzle-game! There were some questions and unclear things, like what the actual placement rules where and more so what effect my placed rooms had after I had placed them. Because of course I forgot their rules as soon as I had done the placement! :laughing:

The graphics was nice and clear. Very much liked how there was both pattern and color to distinguish the sets. There could have been some more feedback on how I was progressing before completing the sets and some animations with dealing and discarding rooms to make it clearer what happened there.

One thing that left me uncertain though: What happens if I only pick 3 different sets but multiple copies of the same set, does that mean I cannot win the game?

But overall very nice game!

Playthrough:

I wouldn't say it's too easy. The difficulty is pretty much on the sweet spot, not being too frustrating or instantly winning. Though instant wins can also happen even without any real knowledge by just randomly placing whatever you can. But something like a second level with a harder difficulty would be welcome still. And maybe with a level system such as this you could make even an easier level with predefined starter deck and way less options (and more tutorialing) to get players more accustomed to the game more smoothly.

One thing that could help understand the sets thing (especially with the variable set sizes) would be to show how many pieces of each set you have on those lighting up indicators too. The most confusing thing about sets to me was that dupe tiles didn't seem to really count at all and you needed to have all unique tiles of that color. And of course the dual color tiles make the sets more confusing to grasp at first. That's why I was so confused about my win too cause I thought I had more necro tiles to play for it but I guess the rest were warlock only.

@local-minimum, if you choose

It did take me a bit to understand it but it was well worth it. I love the design and puzzle aspects. Nice job! :D