SumMon - A Summoner's Monster Pet Shop by Rowdy3

You just opened up your very own Pet Shop!
But you're not selling any old kind of pets, no, no.
You only summon the cutest monsters for your customers!
Accept requests from potentional customers using your magic crystal ball and then venture out to gather resources by placing path tiles to reach all the resources necessary to summon the most suitable demons, djinn or eldrith horrors to satisfy you customer's needs!


Mix and Match resources to summon the cutest (and most profitable) monsters and then sell them.
(Or release them if you can't find a buyer.)
Spend you hard earned money to buy new path tiles to reach even the furthest part of the land!


Wohooo! We made it! <3
Sadly, we were unable to do things like mixing colours, upgrades, special tiles, new maps and grey summons :( But we got so much done!! :)
This was a very productive jam for us and we're quite proud of what we accomplished this time.
It was a blast but ohhh boy, we're dead. Time to sleep.
Credits:
Art & Game Design & Text -> Milki
Programming & Game Design & Text -> Yak Yak
We had no time for music.
| Google Drive Download | https://drive.google.com/file/d/1fb2R7efNu8gU2ZqSNp8_u2CIlU_wq_La/view?usp=sharing |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/summon-a-summoners-monster-pet-shop |
Ratings
| Given | 6🗳️ | 2🗨️ |

Now I wanna listen to the slightly silly demons
Haha, all valid points.
Milki here.
We had no time at all for balancing, the map was supposed to be smaller first, with resources less spread out in the beginning when you have less tiles and then you'd buy more map space in the shop. As it is rn, after selling a couple Mons and gaining more tiles you can usually clear the map easily and then skip gathering for a couple days in a row.
At first it was a fixed order of starting at the message screen then moving on to the gathering screen, then summoning, then shop and every phase was mandatory. I made the husband change that to the hub screen where you can do each thing as you please. I am glad I made that a hill to die on. :D
The band one was one of Yak Yak's quest descriptions.. it made me laugh too!
UI is intuitive, but still lacks some beneficial informations, such what ingredients could result in specific slot, if that kind of QoL you allow in your game design. Drag'n'drop works, of course, just slightly jarring.
I get that orders have "time" limit to encourage going for specific fruits/shrooms, but to think about it, you don't want to not take them all in the present moment. So what's the purpose of this tab at the end, aside flavour texts?
Map can, to put simply, lockdown you at the start point, and you will leave without anything. Random, oh random. Better narrow it to the meaningful influence, and Shop is seemingly here to solve this, but no, it's still random as well. Why not give a choice between [n] tiles every purchase, or maybe set of them when you start exploring, and then you get others from the deck?
Other than my muttering, good work! I can imagine what polished version of the game could be, and that says a lot.
Thank you for your thoughtful feedback!
We actually think quite similar about most of the points you made. In the end we had to make the cut somewhere to make the deadline, but we already have a version floating around here addressing some of the issues you mentioned:
The map is starting with less tiles now, but we also added a way to extend it by buying additional space in the shop. We may scale the amount of ingredients available on it accordingly to make it worthwhile or something, but we'll see.
We also still want to add a way to better (or at all) see the effects of ingredients of course and also the possibility to buy a second color slot to support mixed colors :)
There are also a few ideas regarding the timed aspect of orders and the benefit of keeping your monsters for a while in our heads, but its not completely fleshed out yet :D
It's like a potion craft but with creature :smile:
And yea, I really missed some sounds and nice background music, but it's OK, we all know how it is during jams.
Anyway, congratulations on such nice game.