Cosmic Caster by Whysper

[raw]
made by Whysper for Ludum Dare 54 (JAM)

Play as a wizard in a spaceship, able to cast powerful spells at various incoming enemies using the mouse to draw letters! Different elements have different abilities, which are required to defeat enemies with differing resistances. Pick up upgrades to make individual elements stronger. Good luck in the arena!

Credits to data-flair https://data-flair.training/blogs/handwritten-character-recognition-neural-network/ for pretrained model used for handwriting recognition

Credits to Kenney https://www.kenney.nl/ for ship and projectile assets

Music composed by @Jaffawaffle https://soundcloud.com/drew-duffey-551421723

Fair warning, Linux version is untested!!!

Post your highest scores in the comments!!!

(Reuploaded with some minor bug fixes)

Ratings

Given 15🗳️ 5🗨️

Feedback

Gallone
02. Oct 2023 · 22:53 UTC
Developer Here! I got a high score of 392
funemaker
02. Oct 2023 · 23:16 UTC
Hi, very nice! Really inventive idea on how to cast the spells. I couldn't quite figure out how to draw the A but the other ones worked pretty well.
Axelrod777
02. Oct 2023 · 23:36 UTC
I got 475! This is quite fun. Drawing shapes quickly with the mouse hurts the hands a bit, but I like dodging while trying to draw as a mechanic. The T seems to come up when I don't want it to a lot, but I do like the justification in the tutorial as some good flavoring for it. The weapons feel a bit weak, but I guess that's okay considering you can use them over and over.
🎤 Whysper
03. Oct 2023 · 00:43 UTC
We decided ahead of time that training our own model and messing with until we got better results would likely take us well out of scope, but other than the abundance of Ts it came out okay!
DeadByDeath
05. Oct 2023 · 12:59 UTC
Wow, really interesting! Very clever idea to draw stuff on the screen to do spells. Amazing idea! Keep up! My highscore was 167!
aurror
05. Oct 2023 · 22:55 UTC
I love the idea of drawing spells. And the recognition of the letters worked really great!
NIrlandec
06. Oct 2023 · 13:52 UTC
The idea is cool , can't even imagine the code behind, I love the little cute art, could use some polish , but its still wonderful. Well done.
TRASEVOL_DOG
06. Oct 2023 · 15:46 UTC
Interesting game! My highscore was 319, I felt like the number of enemies was way overwhelming and should have been toned down, maybe until later in game. At the same time I felt like getting hit wasn't doing enough damage and so it seemed the best strategy was just to cast spells and ignore the lasers, which in the end was stressful and felt weird. This is just my opinion to be fair but I think it would work better with only a few enemies at a time but when they hit you it actually hurts. Still a very interesting idea and it's actually pretty impressive how well the letters are recognized. To have managed that and then also build a small game around it seems like a pretty good job overall, why disable ratings? :slight_smile:
LDJam user 206001
07. Oct 2023 · 05:53 UTC
I couldn't draw any shape that would release any magic. I'm not feeling lucky today :-( . But the enemies don't deal damage to me, I didn't think the whole thing made much sense.
Togis
07. Oct 2023 · 22:03 UTC
I think I must draw letter very differently then you do. Most of my letters are not recognised or end up being the fire spell.

I was drawn to your game by the concept, I really love the idea of drawing on the screen to cast spell.

However, as I was not able to cast many of them, I am not the best to give an opinion.

The only things I could say are:

- Your menu button are light green text on white background, this is really hard to read for me
- The normal game difficulty ramp up quick
- I think it would help a lot to add some feedback when the enemy takes damage (for instance just blinking them red)
epic_zeta
08. Oct 2023 · 17:20 UTC
Please export to MacOS also!
Igor KinGamer
09. Oct 2023 · 04:41 UTC
Interesting idea!

I wasn't able to get it to recognize an "M" till I realized how I should make it. I knew it was what I needed: 554 points after I got it.

The Tutorial and Practice Drawing help, but I think less enemies should come in the first minutes of play for the player to get the hang of it. That aside, it's a fun game, good job!
kulmajaba
09. Oct 2023 · 14:16 UTC
328 points, mostly by swinging rocks at enemies.

Overall a fun concept and interesting challenge in how you interweave drawing the shapes among avoiding damage, but maybe letters aren't the best shapes for this mechanic (although I do realize they are probably the easiest).

Art style, sound and music were definitely well matched.
Lee Martin 77
09. Oct 2023 · 14:34 UTC
Really cool idea for a game, and a very different take on the classic space shooter! The drawing of the spells was a listtle confusing as I was initially trying to make the shapes, rather than the letters - but I got there in the end! The sound and visuals were really neat.
Griddolini
09. Oct 2023 · 15:00 UTC
Very clever, implementation is pretty iffy sometimes - A i feel like is not a great choice for something you need to draw with a contiguous line! But I think with some extra thought and refinement this would be really neat.
knightoftheday
12. Oct 2023 · 11:16 UTC
Clever mechanics, but little bit cryptic how to play! Nice and fun game!
LDJam user 238639
15. Oct 2023 · 18:00 UTC
I think the enemies just don't take enough damage. I wasn't sure the flamethrower was even doing anything until I saw the little healthbars on the enemy ships going down a little bit. Once there were a bunch of enemies, I didn't see how I was supposed to get caught back up. I also took a while to even realize where my own healthbar was because it seemed like I was allowed to take a lot of damage but I wasn't dying. With the drawing mechanic being somewhat complex, maybe other parts of the game could've been simplified a bit.