itch.io

Thanks for playing, and for the feedback!

The physics grass is long due a visual upgrade :)

Yeah, the chain is experimental.  I have plans to ameliorate the wall issue.  You're right about the motivation behind it; the physicality of the chain also allows for some interesting techniques - for example, if you hold left click in the distance while out of casting mode, and then activate casting mode, the chain's quick movement while spawning will blow a powerful gust of wind in a line from yourself to your mouse cursor, which you can use to blast enemies or accelerate yourself.  I'm not sure whether I'll keep it, but if I do, it needs to be less janky.

Thanks for the bug reports.  Turns out that mass spawn bug happens if the upgrade dialogue triggers on the same frame that the enemy spawning ticks.  Just a stupid mistake on my part!

Yeah, the red gobbos are maybe too fast - you *can* outpace them by blowing yourself along on the wind, or blowing them away, but I'm aware this capability isn't really signposted, and without it they're pretty intractable.  Probably enemies should ramp up in speed more gently.  The next DD needs a better tutorial, a proper UI system, and generally better robustness.

Thanks again for the helpful comment!

Thanks for playing!

Yeah, I wanted to build a vertical slice of what a longer game's combat evolution might look like, as a test bench for seeing how fluid-dynamics combat would work.
Glad the technical underside seems better (although it has a long way to go!)

Yes, the wind can blow the fire; from watching people play, it seems like the perspective makes it hard to see which part of the fire is the base and which is the higher-up parts - 'grabbing' the base with the wind works better, grabbing the higher-up bits is less effective (because it's further from the ground/less hot).  I plan to have the camera change angle when you activate casting mode to help mitigate this, as well as better differentiating fire that's just high up in the air.

Yeah, the player is a bit slow.  It was too fast before the DD, and I overcorrected... 
(If you're still playing, could you please press F3 and then 'K' at some point?  I'd  be interested to see whether you've got 60FPS or not)

Thanks for playing,  and thanks for the feedback!

You're a wizard, but all your magic is just messing with the world's fluid mechanics simulation, and you burn as easily as anything else!
This is a combat demo!  Try to survive and kill as many of your fellow goblins as possible.

Press 'space' to toggle casting mode.  You're able to cast magic when you see the blue magical tentacle: this is how you impose your will on the world.  Your tentacle is, unfortunately, short, and so you can't do magic too far away from yourself... 
While casting, use left click and drag to drag the wind, and right click to add fire into the world.  Creating fire is very expensive!  Get some mana regen upgrades or use the environment to your advantage.  I hear grass burns...

This is pretty early in development.  (Audio is missing in this release!) If you have any technical difficulties, or the game just doesn't run well, please let me know!

Good central gameplay concept, a lot more fun than I expected from the itch page.   Only played up until the ladder level (which I liked a lot!)  
The game is visually emulating the style of old platformers, but it clearly isn't one, technically speaking.  This means that some 'glitches' feel more contrived than others.

The most fun glitches were the very physical ones, that had to do with multiple systems in the world interacting.  My favourites were spamming e while holding a box to shift yourself backwards, and jump+e while on box to get high up with the box in hand.  These glitches felt like the natural outcome of poorly-thought out, but fundamentally simple programming.  I've written games with glitches like these!  The first ladder glitch felt good, too.

The glitches that emulated old games felt weaker to me, specifically the one about limited numbers of sprites being able to be drawn on the screen.  It's fake: the game box physics 'really' behave the way they do, but this behaviour is scripted.  In old engines, you got that sort of visual glitching because the game was fundamentally low-level and you were reading memory at an offset you weren't meant to.  Here, the glitching is a sprite drawn in an editor!  Because it's 'fake', this glitch can't combine with any other puzzle mechanics (which is presumably why it only exists for one level, then is removed).

In this game, you have the player controlling the princess, and the narrative figure of the dev embodied in-game, trying to fix bugs as she uses them to bypass obstacles.  But there's a hidden, 3rd character:  the real-life Dev, responsible for the bugs.  
The game presents a fiction that it's an old, 16-bit game or whatever, but it clearly isn't.  The sprites move freely
Some of the bugs really feel like they were added by ingamedev.   They feel like a naturalistic part of the game world (that is, the fictional game we're meant to be controlling a character inside of).  The sprite bug doesn't.  It was clearly added in by RealLifeDev, and I think it weakens the game mechanically and thematically, because once I saw it I started second-guessing whether any later puzzle would have an answer that lay within the pre-existing physics of the game world or whether it would be some scripted reference to old game engine limitations (that this game does not have!) that I'd just have to guess. 
If the author had actually made the game 8-bit and actually used sprite slots, that puzzle could have been good - because you'd have been able to integrate it with the rest of the game!
But as it is now, I don't think it fits with the puzzles involving block glitches (which are great).
The other glitches fell inbetween the box glitches and the sprite vanishing for me in terms of how much I liked them.

I like a lot of things about the game.  A game about glitches in the game itself could be really great, and I see fragments of that greatness shining through here.  I hope the author makes a version 2, or in general keeps making games and gets great at it!

Thanks for the video!  It's very useful to see exactly how a player interacts with things.  I'm glad the fire/air is cathartic to mess around with (I still find it fun to just swirl the air around, and I've been staring at this thing every day for months...!)

I'll try and flesh out the experience/puzzling more for the next DD :)

(Yeah, the map is limited in size, and I just draw the edges endlessly out to infinity....  Sorry!  I noticed you butted up against the invisible walls when trying to blow air, as well - I'll have to expand the edges of the overworld map 1 screen-width away from the edge of the island...)

Thanks!  

Thanks!  Yeah, I ran out of time to get content in.

For future puzzles, the idea is more that the player will  come to intuitively understand bits of fluid dynamics by solving the puzzles, part of that is just adding more complicated steps to the problem of burning things.  An important part of this is limiting the players' wind ability- I want to make the mouse cursor become 'physical' when you're doing magic such that you can't add wind inside a room, behind a wall, unless you can snake your mouse cursor in.   With this limitation, there's a lot more leeway to make puzzles of the sort "how do you get the correct pattern of airflow into this room only by manipulating what's outside of it?" (There are grates that air can pass through but physical things can't). 

Here are some puzzle elements I want to add:

- vertical windmills that do different things depending on which side you blow them on (imagine a puzzle where you have to spin this thing clockwise to make a door open, but counterclockwise to close it)

- Opening and closing doors to influence airflow in pipes

- Ice floors (you can blow yourself and objects with your wind)

-Trying not to burn things (A room full of TNT with a torch in the middle, but you have to use your air to solve a problem)

-Something something tesla valves

There'll be variants on the 'just light the candle on fire' puzzle that explore more and more interesting obstructions - that might be the first thing I finish.

You are a wizard who can control the air with his mind.  There are torches, and unlit white candles.  You must light the candles, but cannot yourself conjure fire, so get to blowing!

This version actually has puzzles!  Well, two of them.  I rushed to add the level selection and so on, and only found the time to add two levels plus the hub area... more to come.

This demo is a puzzle game.  There are cryptic clues to the controls in the intro area, but here they are again in case it's not clear:

WASD to move

Left click + drag to throw the wind around.  This is your main way of interacting with the world.

E to open and close doors and use teleport crystals.

ESC to return to the hub/quit the game if you're in the hub.

(There are more controls, including the level editor, but they're hidden behind bebug mode - see if you can find them >:) )

I might add more maps/puzzles over the weekend, but I'll be quite busy, so we'll see.

Thanks for playing!  Please tell me how the game felt if you played it.

Good to hear!  Optimizing this thing is a bit weird (lots of GPU crosstalk).  
(It's actually constantly simulating all of the tiles representing wind and fire for the whole island, which means performance is constant w.r.t. those things...)
Thanks for playing!  I hope to have a gameplay demo for next DD :)

Not a bug per se, I uploaded a new version to fix some framerate problems another commenter was having and this - spawning bushes around an entity - was what I was experimenting with at the time (as a prototype for how elementals might work).  I should probably have set the game world to a more 'normal' state before uploading!

Yep, just sticking a while(time not right){} loop at the end fixed it!  I've uploaded a new version with the improved performance (it feels a lot better at a solid 60FPS than 30!), plus one or two other little things I added over the weekend.  Thanks for the help, friendly lain-anon :)

Thanks for mentioning this, I'm seeing it on my windows machine as well. 

I think I see the problem.  To maintain 60FPS, the game sleeps for the remainder.  At least on my windows machine, when it does this, it sometimes sleeps for way too long (even though the requested sleep time is correct).  This is what's behind it being at 30FPS on your machine.  Very strange, I'll have to put in a better system.

No, the default is 60!  If your PC is beefy then it running at 30 is  probably a bug...  Are you on Windows?

If you run and press 'g', that'll show the profiler.  This is what it looks like for me (running generally at a comfortable 60fps)...  It could be a problem in the vsync implementatio of the graphics libraries I'm using.

Thanks for playing :)

Hm.  The jumping is part of an attempted optimization that's less noticeable at 60fps (batching world-driven changes to the sim and only uploading them to the GPU every few frames), but when limiting my own FPS to 30 it becomes obvious and ugly.  It looks like I'll have to replace that with something better, thanks for pointing it out!

Glad you find them fun - that means it's time to build interesting things out of them!

The dynamic background animations are neat!  Especially the transition to the star mode.

Looking forward to see what else you add to flesh out the game, if you decide to.

Haha, the red triangle's just a test triangle I forgot to remove!
Thanks for giving it a go.  Your rig's a lot better than mine!

I like the look of things.  Agree with Tinto on the sprite origins/collision being a problem.

Also, the enemy seemed to have a hard time picking the right directional attack to use.  I was flying above it for a while, and for three attacks in a row it would attack down.

Looking forward to seeing what you build this into!

It's a tech demo of a game where you're a wizard interacting with the world via fluid dynamics!  Drag the air to blow it around, add heat, burn grass and bushes (and yourself, if you're not careful!) 

If you download it, please tell me if and how well it ran on your machine.  The fluid dynamics are a bit resource-intensive! You can get performance info with 't' and 'g.'.

You have a character now.

WASD to move him around

LEFT CLICK to add heat into the world

RIGHT CLICK + drag to blow air around

Heat hurts you as well.  (No health bar yet, I'll try to add that by the end of the weekend...)

The goblins walk towards and away from you, but they're not very clever (they get stuck on the walls) and they can't hurt you yet.  You can blow them (and yourself) around with wind, though!  Or burn them to death (you monster...)

'r' regenerates the map

'z' generates a flat plain

'f' reverses the flow of time for fluids (sort of).

in general, most of the arrow keys do something debug-y.  

Nice visuals.  Are you doing a falling-sand fluid sim for the shells?

The platforming and spirit mode are tricky!  In particular, it took me some time to figure out what spirit mode even was...  the room with the tutorial in seems a bit small to build up the required speed?  Clearly I was doing it wrong, somehow...  
Killed the void lord (just barely!) by wall jumping up above him and hovering in the air at the top of the shaft shooting down.

Fun game!

I get the same issue as jamak.

Hm.  On my machine, It couldn't find liblua.so.5.4. I have lua 5.4 on the machine, I checked, but it's in /usr/lib64 as liblua5.4.so.5.4.  I made a copy under the right name, and when I tried to run the program I got 'Illegal Instruction', which I imagine is a lua thing?

Thanks for playing!  Yeah, the floor is made of grass, and under high heat it'll catch fire and burn, feeding heat which catches more grass on fire... 
I have some pretty in-depth technical plans for the sound design - I want the crackle of burning grass, the whistling of wind, goblin screams...  made as procedurally from the world as I can manage.

Thanks for giving it a go! Yes, it needs more visual/audio feedback about things in the world burning and contributing heat.

I definitely want to keep the analogue/intuitive feel!  The spell casting system I have planned is built around exploring/using that as much as possible.

In my dev version, you can blow the goblins around with the wind, and later you'll be able to freeze water on the floor to make ice, which'll make things a lot easier to push around and send careening into each other...

It'll be a proper game!  ..Eventually...

Thanks for playing!  I often find myself drawing and writing, as well, even when I intended to work on the code  :)

Yeah, better visual feedback as to what's going on is big on the list - I plan to add fire effects (and change how fire works mechanically, so things take a while to burn and blacken and shrink as they do) and smoke, as well as a particle system in general to show which ways the wind is blowing.

(You can pause the sim with 'H', if you like- makes drawing easier!)

You might have played this in the last demo day.  There's more stuff!

In this prototype, you can move the camera around, add heat and wind to the world to watch how things swirl and butt up against walls, kill those funny little goblins, and burn things made of grass (which in turn adds heat back into the world!)

CONTROLS:
WASD to move around

Left click to add heat

Right click and drag to blow the air in that direction (Try holding both!)

Click middle mouse to rotate camera

ESC to quit

R to re-generate world (takes a second)
L to toggle fluid sim debug window

...And a lot more...!

I've briefly tested on windows, but please tell me how it runs if you play it- and crucially, how it feels to blow air around!

Yes, that's all you can do in the last uploaded version (plus zoom in/out with I/O and look at some debug stuff with L).  I didn't manage to get real gameplay in there by the end of the demo day- I hope to have something more polished the next time we do something like this.

Thanks for giving it a download and play!  And thanks for the heads-up on the memory leak- turns out I didn't understand how you're meant to use openGL fence syncs.  I thought you called glFenceSync every frame to synchronize stuff, but that actually creates a new fence object.  Whoops!  It's fixed now, and the memory leak is gone.  Thank you!

Nice!  I've got an x220 here.

I'm sorry about that!  The laptop's power shouldn't be a problem so long as it's from the last 10 years and has OpenGL on it-I dev/test the game on a 2011 thinkpad.  It's probably a problem with how I set it up for windows (although of course it ran fine on the win11 machine I tested it on...)

I'll need to setup win10 on a testing machine.  Sorry it didn't work for you, that's really frustrating.

(If you're up for it, you could run the game's exe from console- it'll probably put out some kind error message when it crashes.)

Oh no- what did it say?  Are you on windows?

Probably the last update of this game jam... and possibly the best one yet!

LEFT-CLICK to add heat/red ink!

RIGHT-CLICK and DRAG to drag the air, blowing the ink around!

MIDDLE-MOUSE to rotate and zoom the camera.

WASD to move the camera!

Thanks to everyone who tried out this very early prototype/tech demo.  Whenever and wherever we show off our games to each other next time, I'll be there with some real gameplay!

They're calling it closed beta now!  150 people-ish?  A few more are added every few weeks or so.

They are!  Not yet, it's a tech demo at present, though I hope to have a build with some gameplay out by the end of the Demo Day.

It's written in Jai, Jon Blow's new language.  The engine is homebrew, but uses some libraries - Jai comes bundled with a bunch of modules, including one that I'm using for cross-platform window creation and setting up openGL contexts, text rendering, drawing primitives/sprites, etc.  The language's modules are very hackable, which is nice.

There's a lot of raw OpenGL in the code, especially for the fluid dynamics simulation and rendering, which is done by having two textures for the fluid sim state (one 'now' and one which is for the next time step), and having the fluid sim shader read from the first and render to the second texture before the texture handles get swapped.

As a fellow WizardLike dev, I felt compelled to give this a go.  I liked it!

Things I liked:

The art, especially the title screen.  Except for the main character, weirdly enough...  But generally I like the style a lot,

The evil witch is wearing skimpy clothes, I approve.

directional staff swinging.  Feels good to hit an enemy on an angle!

The interplay of the staff and spells in general- when you first hit the star with the staff and launch it, it's a great little moment of 'oh, I can do that?', and incorporating it into your fighting style afterwards is fun.  I hope there's a lot more like this in the game! 

The general wizardly vibe is pretty good, too.  Although- if you have all your spells from the start, and are mainly finding items with which you utilize them more effectively, aren't you really multiclassing into rogue?  Interesting...

Things I didn't like:

There are a lot of people on this island.  I know there's the explanation that they were all sent here by the witch, but the first one who says that is off to the top-left...  Fewer NPCs, more dialogue per NPC?

  There's lag between pressing to move and the character actually moving.  I suppose they might be accelerating to full speed?  But with the way it's tuned now, it doesn't feel good- it feels slightly sluggish.  If I quickly tap 'left' in succession, the character doesn't move at all, even though it definitely feel like he should!

The current controls are a bit clunky in general.  WASD/JKL is fine, but selecting spells is a pain.  I imagine you directional spell selection would work well on a gamepad, and that's why you've chosen it, but for keyboard couldn't you add bindings to let me press 1/2/3/4 to pick the spells?

The enemies are a bit mechanically samey despite looking different... generally I'd rather fight 1-4 enemies that are actually smart and have different mechanical behaviours/moves rather than a room full of dumb enemies that move and shoot at random.  I feel like there's an opportunity to tie the enemies and environment in with the magic some more, too..  I like the tortoise enemies in principle, but then I'd hit them from the south while they were facing west and feel like I should be hitting underneath their shell.  Not sure how to solve that one.

The cliff walls look good when they're only 1 tile high, but for me the 2+ tile high cliff walls looked unnatural due to the seam between them at each 'height-level'.

--

I realize there's a lot of negative in the list, but I do like the game!   I suppose it 'feels' like an actual game more than a lot of the things I've seen this DD, so I'm judging it as if I'd downloaded it off steam, hah.  I really want to see this made as good as it can be, though, so I've tried to give honest feedback.

Looking forward to playing this some more, and when it's updated/done!