Creative gameplay and fits well with the theme.It would be nice to have some hints in the game!

Very immersive gameplay, I really like it! Though I could not solve the puzzle, sign.

Very cool immersive experience. I have a hard time with the riddles, but the idea is really solid.

I love the ambience! The audio, graphics, and writing are probably the most well-crafted of any game I've tested yet.

Flawless presentation. The art and audio fits perfectly. The dialogue was punchy and really hooked you. It was daunting to see how many symbols there were, which almost turned me off from the game entirely. The grid system is smart, much more reliable than my game's drawing system. There's not really a gameplay reason to draw symbols though since you're essentially just picking them from a list. It would've been nice to see the book while drawing, because I ended up having to go back and forth several times to draw one symbol.

I think the riddles can be too opaque or misleading. I spent 20 minutes on the first one. I didn't realize that each page was 1 level since you had multiple pages available to you at once. After that it got easier, but I still had to do a ton of guessing. For example, what does "shielding" and "flashes of death" mean? "flash" is really the only relevant word in that clue. Other ones I didn't get are "last taste" and "dare to embrace". Easy clues take 5 secs and are fun, but hard ones take 15 minutes of brute forcing. If you just don't get a clue, there's nothing you can do.

The game would tell you when you got 2 or 3 right, so I used that for guessing a bunch. If you methodically draw sloth over a symbol, the game will tell you if you were going in the right direction, so you can use that to figure out which exact symbols were right and wrong. Then you can brute force all the symbols. It's the best way to win but it ends up being super tedious. I guess Obra Dinn had a similar issue.

That said, I did beat it after almost 2 hours! (I have extra free time today otherwise I would've stopped earlier.) I did the last 5 puzzles in about 5 minutes since the search space got exponentially smaller and I memorized many of the drawings. I really wish you used Game and Give though. I thought "gold is all I wanted" was gonna be related to those, which would've been a great LD reference. I do think you'll end up getting that gold.

This game is so much up my alley you wouldn't believe. It took me over half an hour to complete and I rarely spend more than ten minutes on a single game. The writing and the art are top notch and the puzzles were excellent with a couple of exceptions.

I agree with @foolmoron that it would be useful to have the book visible while you draw the symbols and that it was a bit daunting in the beginning. As much I enjoyed solving the riddles, the mechanic started to get a bit stale towards the end. Also, some times it wouldn't register the signs correctly and some words were a bit too similar (hate and wrath are essentially the same thing, for example).

I don't know if it was intentional that the last symbol covered all the dots, but if so, nice touch :)

@foolmoron Thanks for the long comment, and that you spent so much time playing my game!

The gameplay reason for drawing the symbols, and the fact that you need to memorize them, is for exactly that: I think it's immersive that you need to draw them, and fun that you need to memorize them. In my opinion, changing it to selecting the symbol instead, would not have improved the game.

It's unfortunate that you had to do so much bruteforcing. I agree that some riddles might be too vague. Perhaps I should have emphasized more on the fact that it's a short connecting story. The "last taste" one might be too vague, but "punish he who poured the cup" reveals something about that first line that can help you. It's also the nature of this type of game, I think, that there will always be people disagreeing on the correct interpretation of the riddle, or that it would otherwise be too easy for most. I have never played Obra Dinn, but I can totally see how it has that same problem.

@arzi Thank you as well! And it actually was not intentional haha. What is intentional though is that that last poem is relevant to the thing you summon.

Wow I loved the challenge of this game, even the first riddle took me like 15 minutes! Graphics and music fit the mood perfectly too. Maybe you could've made the first riddle easier (like reallyyy easy) just to help ease the player into it a bit?

There's a ton of effort here and I really like it. However, the dialogue is a lot for a game that's already very complicated. This game could benefit from just being more brief with its exposition and less obscure with its most basic instructions. Overall I really like the idea!

I really feel like you're super close to something truly excellent. These are the kinds of games that I dreamed about making when I was playing my DS regularly. Being able to see both screens at all times and draw runes / symbols whenever with a stylus would be super satisfying to me.

I love the presentation here but like others have said, the puzzles just sort of drop in at full volume and that can scare people off or result in them completely missing the point entirely. Obviously with more time you could've done a little intro bit with a simpler puzzle as a tutorial to at least explain the basics, because ONCE YOU GET IT, you can start putting it together rather quickly. I just personally felt like it was taking a long time to GET IT. Turns out I was barking up the wrong tree for 12 minutes.

Great use of theme and really solid presentation. The drawing IS SO FUCKING SATISFYING! UGHHHHHGHGHGHGHG

@sonnybone Thanks Sonny! I really thought I had it this time, with the dialogue explaining and all that, but I greatly underestimated how overwhelming this game can be if you play it for the first time. I would love to take another look at it in the near future to make it a more solid product.

Love me some riddles! Very polished entry, with QOL features too??? I appreciate it :D
I personally didn't find this difficult at all, everything clicked rather quickly... and I hadn't read any tips or comments :p
One of the pages didn't translate, so I brute forced the final poem with 3/4 clues, no biggie. Cute story as well, lovely artworks. All in all, great job!

ok so… art is great, riddles are good, having to draw the runes is cool, the end is lowkey moving, how the game (in the first phase) answers your questions even before you can formulate them in your head…

to be honest, i don't see a flaw in your game. maybe the drawing recognition for "lips" was a bit hard to trigger, but apart from that, i haven't encountered any issue. some riddles were more difficult than others, but i don't see how that'd be a bad thing, since i was able to solve them all.

great game, great job!

Really strong mood with this one! It's really well done, the little drawings to do are a nice idea and work well. The riddles are really nice, and fortunately for me don't rely on word plays or sayings that a non-native speaker couldn't understand. The first page is rough, then it gets easier and easier to figure stuff out. That's very satisfying.

My game is based on the same idea (reading book to draw symbols), but somehow we ended up with very different games, that's nice.

Perfect execution on your idea, great job!

Thanks for submitting your game to the stream! If you wanted to watch it again in the future heres the vod of the stream (with a chapter for your game)

https://youtu.be/Foe4js2jhJ0?t=1600

And I'm the host for the ludum dare score chasers tournament this Ludum Dare. Wanted to ask if youre fine if I put some gameplay of the game in an intermission video. Last year for reference:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TM_eIvjBmIQ

@ategon Hey thanks again for playing it on stream! And yes I'm fine with that.

I enjoyed the game very much!
The idea is great and the execution is impressive for a game jam.

As for some (hopefully) constructive criticism.
Problems I've noticed:
* Sometimes fade out after drawing a symbol is slow;
* I feel like the game expects me to draw some symbols in a specific order (I mean put lines in a specific order). Try drawing emperor symbol in different ways;
* Currently the difficulty curve is strange - the game is at its hardest at the beginning because there are lots of new symbols to get used to and they all could be used, then later there are barely any symbols and it's easier to understand which ones are meant. I would suggest hiding some of the symbols for the future as well;
* Some riddles are too vague for my taste: "This I do not dare to embrace" - this could be so many things - desert, ocean, forest, wolf, sun, ice, death, star, moon;
* The characters give hints about the last riddle "half right" and "almost right" even when there are only two riddles discovered;
* I got confused with the two riddles: "It is any man's last taste, and so it was mine" and "for I am no more" could both be referring to death

Some ideas for post-jam improvements:
* Add dialogue for every solved riddle to enrich the world, express the characters of the demon and the girls;
* Add sound of moving the chalk, not only putting it to the board;
* Add button to erase everything (sometimes I wanted to switch to a different page and had to erase it all individually)
* Create Easter egg summons that are not shown in the book but exist as combinations for fun

Anyways, it was nice playing your game and seeing your love for directions in books stays alive after One Take and One Act. Love it!

I really expected a single Easter egg combination, mostly using unused symbols: Give Game Life Star/Love

@madpigeon Thanks for the long comment and feedback!

* I spent quite some time on the symbol drawing, but unfortunately was not able to get it perfect for the jam. Either a symbol was recognized too early, or the incorrect one, or not at all. If I make a post-jam version I'll be sure to make it flawless.
* I agree that the difficulty curve is strange. Revealing new symbols was an idea initially, but then it would be obvious that the new symbols are what you need to use for the new riddles. And I think there is a joy to be found in the fact that you are more familiar with the symbols, the fact that you feel yourself improving at the game. More importantly are the riddles themselves that should have been more balanced.
* I think something that a lot of players miss is that each page is like a story (something I would make more clear in a post-jam version). With the line "This I do not dare to embrace" it's about the person who wants to get the gold by defeating the dragon, but he's too scared to do so. With that logic, things like desert, ocean forest, etc. don't really apply here. Same for the story with the line "for I am no more". It is about a person who was poisoned, and who wants revenge/justice.

An easter egg combination would have been fun, but very hard to find. There is one easter that I added because I was sure someone out there was going to draw a certain edgy symbol.

I'm not sure yet if I will make a post-jam version, but I do have ideas for it. Who knows!

> Anyways, it was nice playing your game and seeing your love for directions in books stays alive after One Take and One Act. Love it!

Hahaha thanks, I appreciate that! <3

The artstyle was very cohesive, the jokes were funny, and I liked the witty banter. I wish the visual that you put on the jam submission page's FAQ was in the game just to eliminate some confusion. I also kind of wish there was a mini notebook when it came time to draw so that I didn't have to keep looking back at the symbols. I also wish that you could do one page at a time and not look at the other ones because it's a bit information-overload, but overall the puzzles are clever and I was impressed by the symbol recognition when drawn and how fast it detects it.

Cute and fun, loved the ending

You Damn Riddler Get Out of Gotham! Hahaha sorry I offended. A very interesting game, with a full sense of immersion, and the character dialogue design is also very vivid. I think it is an exquisite game.

This was amazing! I can tell you put a lot of love and care into Summoner Symbols. The music was great, and I really appreciated that there was sound effects for pretty much everything, such as the chalk, the characters talking, the pages flipping, etc. The art style is cozy and well done, and the drawing mechanic was very smooth and fun to play with. The banter was vv witty and had me laughing at a lot of points. I was overwhelmed at first by the number of riddles/levels that were available at the beginning AND the number of symbols, but in the end I did appreciate that I could skip around the different riddles and essentially process-of-elimination some symbols that wouldn't be used later on. I think it would be useful if there was some sort of hint section in the game; it was helpful that the girl would say how many were wrong but I felt like I was brute forcing through some levels or I eventually gave up and looked at the walkthrough video (thank you for including that btw). Overall, extremely good game, I loved the narrative and pretty much everything about it. I would love to see more games that your team creates!

The amount of polish in this game is out of the (LD) world. It's too good to be a game jam entry! Amazing job!

Beautiful game, great idea, great execution. The music is eerie and amazing. Really nice job overall!

It is a great concept and I liked how well you put instructions into dialogues. But for me it was too poetical/hard to understand these riddles so I gave up pretty quick

UPD. I played it till the end. Amazing!

You've already heard my thoughts so all I'll say, thank you for making this game! It was challenging, but I'm glad I got to finish the game! :D I had a challenging, but still overall fun time.

Flawless presentation. The audio and visuals definitely give the spooky atmosphere of trying to summon a demon. The riddles were somewhat challenging but doable with some cleverness.

Played the game with friends (as I am too dumb to solve the riddles alone), we were all amazed ! Also nice conclusion letting young folks know you can get what you desire by summoning the devil :ok_hand:

I think this game is really well done! The art and audio are incredible and really set up such a strong tone for the game. You've absolutely nailed the game's presentation, and I love the vibe that it has

I also think this game is probably the most directly related to the theme that I've seen, so kudos for that!

Additionally, I think that the symbol drawing system is executed flawlessly. It never felt unresponsive in any way and I always was able to tell exactly what I was doing.

I do think that the ability to look at your symbols while drawing could have been beneficial, as there are quite a lot to look through which can make remembering them a little harder, but it only would save a few clicks back and forth so it's not a big deal.

I also really appreciate how much you attempt to aid the player, like in telling us exactly how many symbols are wrong rather than staying silent or punishing the player for incorrect choices. In a puzzle game like this, that quick feedback is incredibly useful in keeping players engaged and having fun

However, I will say that some of the riddles did end up feeling a little obtuse. It could just be me, but there were some that I really couldn't figure out well since there was such a wide breadth of answers to pick from where it seemed like multiple could fit. I know that puzzle games are really hard to tune difficulty for, especially when it comes to things like riddles, and you really did succeed with the difficulty on most of them, but I just feel that some ended up a lot harder than others

But overall, I really liked this game! You did a great job with it!

The dialogues are awesome and got me really hooked! I had a lot of trouble with the riddles before I found out that each page is a short story. I think you should mention that explicitly in the game. It would be cool if there was some reason behind drawing the symbols by hand - even if it's just extra an dialogue line if you do it flawless from the first try. Or maybe more complex puzzles like having to draw the mirrored symbol to unlock an easter egg or something. Apart from that, an excellent mood and a very solid amount of polish, congratz!

Love the atmosphere in this game! Everything here is very well thought out and polished! Honestly I was struggling a bit with the first riddle for a while, and was so focused on it that once I solved it the summon actually jumpscared me a liitle!

Your game is one of three that I wanted to save for last, as a nice way to round off this Ludum Dare with great entries. I have said it before and I will say it many times, but there is something you do which makes your entries always stand out, the Sheep-magic-factor. And it is very present here. You manage to create a narrative, a story which is really captivating. If I would use one word to describe this it would be "intelligent".

You find a way to get so much out of relativly few things.

People have already said it, but I don't mind repeating it: Great visuals, mood/atmosphere, audio and dialogue. In short, a fantastic entry! :trophy: