Such an intriguing game!

I'm a fan of Arx Fatalis, and I really like your spellcasting mechanics for summoning spells!

I really enjoyed playing this game, the effects were all very juicy and I had fun trying to use the abilities together in different ways.

This has been my favorite game to play so far. I think you nailed the gameplay! I love that there's no extra step to buy you just cast the glyph and it just works. I love that you can die and respawn in your home, I loved conquering all the other little enemy homes. There's a lot of small details you added to make the game smoother to play, like slowing it down while you draw, and all the little effects when you power up your minions. I really liked it man I can see that you put a lot of love and effort into this.

I LIKE IT! Love the spellcasting mechanic (and would love to know what you did for it if you don't mind sharing. I made a similar mechanic last year by training a small ML model :smile:).

I like the variety of units and the core concept. Some nice additions may be:
1. Reason to move -- as is, there doesn't seem to be an advantage to moving aside to entertain my left hand. Having projectiles to dodge or items for the player to collect could help with this.
2. Tradeoff on which unit to summon -- I pretty much always bring the biggest unit I can and the game just becomes "can you draw this shape well many times rapidly". Having a cooldown for spawning certain units OR an increasing cost for summoning the same thing consecutively could help.

Combining the ideas from 1 & 2, image the following as part of the core game loop:
-> Summon critters by drawing shapes, each one with a unique cooldown.
-> Move around the map collecting bonus cash for upgrades and cooldown crystals (e.g. -3 seconds from all summons).
-> Be cautious where you position yourself since you can get attacked by enemies / may lose your base.

Ok, whew lots of feedback! Thanks for sharing your project, it's the start of something fantastic.

very addictive!:) Arx Fatalis 4ever! shape recognition is very forgiving and its awesome

Such a creative concept and idea!

Well done, very enjoyable game. As @the-neon-shark mentioned, there is not much reason not to spam your biggest dude, especially since that was the easiest shape to draw for me. There was also nothing stopping me from spamming new summons :laughing:
Perhaps a magic meter that automatically recharge could work here.

Super cool game. All mechanics works really well together. One of the best submissions I checked so far. Good job!

The drawing mechanic is really cool, I always loved that mechanic in games and am surprised more games don't try it. There is a lot of interesting things you can do with it. Might be interesting to actually remove the drawings so the player has to remember what shapes summon what.

The drawing mechanic is great! I tried to create something similar in Pico-8 to summon moths but I couldn't work out how to do it in the time XD! The graphics are nice, and the play was really fun, it was quite addictive and I like the way drawing slowed down summoning your helpers, I think someone elses suggestion of remembering the shapes in harder levels is a good one!

"Wow! We accidentally created a very similar drawing mechanic in our games! :D
Cool game, but it's a pity it's not very clear how to draw one of the symbols, which, apparently, is supposed to spawn a bomb - I personally couldn't figure it out. Anyway, great job!"

@greenradiation this is how I draw it

Had really fun. The music and the art style are also lovely <3

I really had fun with this game. The mechanics are fun, cute art, nice music and sounds. <3 I'm going to keep playing later today!

Your game looks very polished, it's amazing. I loved the drawing mechanic, felt like I was really doing gesture to summon stuff :D

The visuals and audio are cool, it all makes an engaging and humoristic mood.

Great game!

The spell drawing mechanics are just bomb! Great light effects! We have a similar mechanics implemented in our game too, but we made drawing spells through the spell panel. Thanks for the source code! Hopefully I'll get your spell secret out of it someday:)

Nice idea with drawing spell mechanics, reminds me few old games with similar feature.

In addition of what @the-neon-shark already said you can make each unit being useful against
certain enemy, building etc. Also could be cool to see enemy summoners.

Nice idea. The drawing mechanics works amazing. I really like it, good job :)

@the-neon-shark thanks for feedback. For this entry I've trained one big lazy model - myself :)
I have patterns as 32x32 black/white images. Then I convert drawn gesture into same format, and then compare pixels with some optimizations and hacks:
* looking for pixel in pattern in 3x3 area, counting that. Several drawn pixels may match same pattern pixel.
* counting pixels from drawn image that do not match pixels in pattern
* counting pixels from pattern that do not match any pixel in drawn image
* then summarize all of that counters with different weights

I've drawn multiple figures and ran comparison with pattern multiple times with different methods and weights to find better one.

I think it is good task for ML, I need to study more about them.

I LOVE that you rolled your own lightweight detector and backed it up with some graphs!!! So cool dude. Thanks for sharing the info on that. You should definitely read up on some ML options (if you're interested in this space of gesture recognition). The classic problem of character recognition is effectively the "Hello World" of machine learning these days.

Fun concept for the mechanic!
I think what I had fun actually doing was trying to figure out how to utilize the results of the casted spells -- I mean like, the self teaching through trial-and-error is the fun part for me... "huh, what's this black flower thing.. oh if I put it near the enemy it does this.. oh if I cast a circle against it, I can shoot the flower forward... etc" I'm kind of saying that I'm glad you don't explain in any detail what each thing does, because it would take away the discovery and be less fun... but also I am saying that they are well conceived because their functions are not so opaque as to becoming completely frustrating.

I like the repetitive aspects of the sound -- splay splat splat -- but also maybe the spells could have unique sounds

I think if you were to continue developing this, there's lots of room for more intricate sound design -- possibly even making sound inform the mechanics.

really great stuff going on here, I liked the summoning mechanic
a lot, good job on that.

Overall Great Work!

Nice game and groovy soundtrack!

I wish you would summon the things at the center of the symbol you draw. It would feel more satisfying and would allow for more tactics I think.

I had trouble spawning bombs which was somewhat annoying, it would often detect regular circles instead. I think it could be a rectangle or an upright triangle for easier distinction.

I feel the bomb/mine looks a bit out of place, having a similar creature like the others but stationary and spikey would fit better to the rest of the game.

Some levels could contain enemy mines you need to clear out.

Some subtle texture on the background would really tie the graphics together.

A healthbar or some damage indication for bases would be nice.

Impressive game nevertheless!

Nicely done. It was short and fun but could have used some additional challenge to it. I loved the graphics and sound.

Really love the concept, though the game gets unforgiving quickly - I got wiped out pretty easily in the final level. ^_^;

A little more feedback on what it means when a summoning fails would also help: often I'd draw a glyph but get a red glow and a flashing icon, suggesting that the glyph was recognized but I'd done something wrong. Is there a limit to how often you can summon certain kinds of monster, or is it more that the game is telling me "you're trying to draw this glyph but you need to draw it better for it to count"?

this game must have been very hard to code and it is rather very fun I am delighted to have known it

I like how game feels overall, but at some point I realized that I just spam same enemies and wait. So feels like gameplay part is kinda vague a bit

This game is insane! Its so cute how did you make the guys wiggly I love it! And the music and sfx are pretty cool, I love the art style and overall aesthetic of the game! Its really fun to spam summon a bunch of the little guys and watch them run around! Overall really impressive work!

Really nice, the mechanic feels good, it's pleasant to lead an unstoppable army ^^