MagiCat

Saw a screenshot of a death screen full of mobs and at that point I knew I had to check this out!

This game has really pretty visuals, great job on the art. Sound design feels very satisfying! <3

I am a little confused on how the crafting works and feel like I'm trashing my materials by clicking them, yet I do figure out how to get the flaming orbs of death & destruction and become a demi-god most of the time. ;)

The game plays like a spiritual brother to my entry., which means Its also a type of game I really really like to play :D

Well done!

This game's real fun, even in the prototype stage. Speaking of:
AT THE TIME OF THIS WRITING, THE ICE ELEMENT IS NOT YET IMPLEMENTED.
I asked Lunar to confirm this; they say a patch is incoming after the jam.
This +/- list looks worse than it is, but there's a lot worth talking about:

+ Really fun game loop; I would play more of this. The elements feel fun and distinctive
+ The art is gorgeous
+ There's quite a few interesting upgrade paths to follow
- Enemies are fast enough that when they spawn in front of you, they're nearly unavoidable. Having no way to heal makes this especially painful.
- Ability balance needs refinement. To whit:
  - Effects that slow/knockback are useless, because enemies push each other along even if you slow the frontrunners. This means that water and earth are trap picks for the first element, while wind doesn't do enough damage to keep up with just picking fire and oneshotting everything early on.
  - The slow/knockback behaviour means that 2/6 of the available upgrades are not valuable. The optimal build is to take 4 levels of pickup range and get ring of fire to level 8 ASAP
- The levelup system triggers on EXP gained, but you can't upgrade anything unless you have the resources for it. You'll skip a number of levelups simply on the basis that you can't buy anything yet and have to wait.
- At higher levels, the upgrade system requires a ton of clicking. Others have mentioned the issues with costs/combining, but making 62 mud for that next upgrade gets rough on the hands.

Being able to have different starting points was nice. The collection and colour of the elemental pickups is also satisfying. The empty spaces where circles could be in the element tree looked like there might be more upgrades to unlock, but combining the tier 2 elements didn’t give me anything new. Played a couple times.

There’s no real indication for when you take damage other than your health bar going down, so it can be hard to gauge how close to enemies you can get away with. It’s hard to say how valuable any of the upgrades apart from pickup radius I and the center one is.

A very beautiful vampire-survivor like with a lot of charm and interesting level up system.

The leveling up really confused me at first but after reading the tooltips and the game page a bit and experimenting I managed to figure it out fairly easy. I gotta say I really like the system, gathering elements and combining them to form other ones to unlock and level up powers is really cool. However I DO NOT like the fact that I am punished and lose resources for incorrect combinations. It feels too heavy and goes against the spirit of experimentation in my opinion.

Also I'm not sure if it's a bug but after you run out of a combined element you can't right click to create it you have to manually combine the 2 base elements again so I found myself keeping at least 1 of them in stock to avoid this.

I wish there was an indicator to show you if you had unlocked everything or not. I feel like I'm missing something in the bottom right but then the whole upgrade screen can be panned around so for all I know I'm missing tons! I couldn't figure out anything to combine with the ice at the very bottom and I swear I tried every combination.

Also some indication of your level/time survived/enemies killed etc would have been cool then you can compare your scores with others.

The art is just absolutely fantastic. I love the main character design and the enemies all look great. The background/level design is full of charm and is nicely detailed. The UI and level-up screen looks great and the effects are fantastic.

The music was kinda quiet and not much to comment on to be honest. The SFX were nice especially the collection sound, it was very satisfying, maybe a level-up sound of some sort would have been nice.

Later on my game became completely unplayable with the hundreds of characters and effects on screen it just lagged SO SO much and ultimately got me killed when I lag spiked into a massive group of enemies and died. A way of healing would be nice :)

Overall a very fun game, I absolutely love vampire survivors and this brings a really nice and unique twist to the forumla. I'd love to see this developed and the spell system turned up to 11, like Infinite craft where you can make anything haha (maybe not that far)

Would love to revisit if there are more updates :)

Nice little game

nice

I haven't played too many games like this before so I was quickly overwhelmed. Then I got the hang of it, figured out the upgrades and had a great time with it. Then I was overwhelmed again, but much later. I might not have tried all combinations but it felt like I was experimenting enough and some elements, like steam or ice (idk if that's supposed to be their name) seemed useless.

Edit: I found that purchasing a spell that requires a secondary element, it consumes all of it, not only the necessary amount (eg. buying the first meteor wile having 11 magma will consume 10 earths and all 11 magma) Is this intentional?

The core concept here is neat. I figured a handful of collection range upgrades + basic attack upgrades + ring of fire + some magma fireballs for extra clearing. Ring of fire in particular is probably responsible for some 99% of enemy deaths.

One annoyance is how you can't figure out the additional elements other than with trial and lots of error, and you lose your elements in the process; the reason why Doodle God works is that you aren't really punished if you don't find out a correct element (and it also had hints). I would prefer if you didn't lose the elements or if any combination you already tried would become disabled. On that note, a UX nitpick - complex elements that ran out no longer have "Create" RMB button working for them. Either way, I found Steam/Cloud/Snow/Mud/Magma and I haven't noticed any other elements combinations, despite seemingly trying all combinations (Snow in particular seemed like a dead end).

Also, while there were quite a few upgrades, many of them boiled down to "stack an attack performed every X seconds". Aside from the general damage + fire rate upgrade and collecting radius upgrade, I'd like to see more upgrades directly affecting the player character and main attack, e.g. health restoration or chaining.

One more thing: it would be nice if triggering the upgrade screen also caused some knockback near the player, so that the player doesn't end up returning to the main game too abruptly.

The artstyle is neat and mostly clear regarding what happens in the game (though at some point the enemies swarm so much the player doesn't have particular strategic decisions left). The music is fitting. At some point the game lagged, though I think that's a given once you advance far enough in this genre (especially with web builds).

Pretty nice overall, but I feel the element upgrades system could use some extra UX love.

I love this! Huge fan of the graphics

Cool game!

Really lovely visuals, but the crafting system is really unapproachable, you might benefit from an ugly wall of handhold-y text in the combining menu.

the little kitty is SO cute

same as others didnt quite understand the spell upgrading, i felt the attacking was a little slow as well? but i had fun :D

Game's quite fun, although the upgrade system was a bit to understand at first, but I loved the fun little animations and the cat :D Keep up the good work!

This is good!! I didn't quite understand the upgrade system and i think it would be better if the attacks were automatic. The game looks good and plays smoothly though! really good job! keep making games!