Mage Matrix by Mads
MAGE MATRIX
Mage Matrix is a tile-based puzzle game where every move counts. The wizards have travelled out into the world and needs you help, and the help of each others summoning abilities, to get safely home. Let everyone know in the comments if you managed to beat all 24 levels.
GAMEPLAY
You are controlling wizards, helping them to get home to their castles. You can move the wizards around, and use the wizards to summon the other wizards.
CONTROLS
- Point and click with mouse only.
- Hold down left mouse button on a Wizard and move him across available waypoints. Release mouse to move.
- To complete a level, each Wizard must be moved to the Castle with the corresponding color.
- A Wizard can only move to or across waypoints that have an adjacent tile with a color corresponding to his own.
- You can use right mouse button to cancel a route you are already planning.
- Left clicking on a Wizard will allow him to summon another Wizard. Click on the Wizard you want to summon, and then on the available summon points.
RULES
- Wizards can only move along tiles with their corresponding color.
- Wizards can only be summoned to spots next to a tile of their correponding color.
CRYSTALS
The game rewards you with crystals based on how well you completed a level. To get 3 crystals you must be perfect (or at least complete it in the fewest number of moves devs thought possible). Can you do it?
POST LAUNCH CHANGES
- Fixed a crash when moving two wizards at the same time
- Fixed a crash when finishing last level
- Changed colors of crystals when level is complete
- Fixed a menu edge case (which no player found)



Ratings
| Overall | 160th | 4⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 171th | 3.931⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 155th | 3.897⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 158th | 4.224⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 257th | 4.179⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 171th | 3.897⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 351th | 3.446⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 334th | 3.845⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 8🗳️ | 15🗨️ |
Very fun and quick puzzle game, not too complex and good concept
I really enjoyed the minimalist approach to UI, as well as the smooth and consistent art, the sound effects (wizard noises hhhnnmm) and the calming background music.
There were definitely 2-3 levels that were real stumpers. Well done!


The puzzles are really well-designed to optimize the moves. And the content is absolutely rich for a JAM game.
The graphics, audio and control are all well-polished. This is my favorite entry so far. Nice work!
The wizard voices are funny and i liked how it ends with the game crashing.
I think fewer but more polished levels would help the game. Often they can feel random and there is a lot of places where you will obviously won't need to go, these just add noise. It might be worthwhile to follow the "less is more" dogma here.
In terms of graphics I found the art to be a bit incohesive. Maybe the hand-drawn style of the mages could be reflected on the grid, or the reduced minimal style of the grid could be used for the mages. For example you could try applying some line art shading and less straight edges to the grid-cells or simpler icons for the castles and mages.
Layout-wise I felt a bit of confusion just by the way the tiles look and the things are placed. Maybe you could drop the double white border and just have one grid line on the background to make it less busy. The mages could have their base on the intersection where they are standing. That said I wonder if the game could work better if you were walking on cells instead of the spaces between them.
I think it'd be nicer if you'd restrain the user to a specific number of moves on each level. It might add more challenge and puzzle, as right now it is easy to bruteforce each puzzle and players often choose the boring bruteforce (even if it hurts their experience) if you let them. Even just showing the target moves for crystals and your progress while playing would help a bit with motivation here.
It would be cool to see previous moves as traces on the levels.
Instead of the "select-summoner->select-summoned->select-position" you could just let the user drag any mage over to another (given it has properly colored spaces around him), I think this would be a big improvement to the UX.
Overall I think this game has potential but the levels need more reduction and you might need to introduce some other mechanic to make it easier to design more interesting levels. Examples include, a mage that can change tile colors, mage that cannot be summoned by others or mages that can only summon some but not all other mages, a mage that can't move at all, one that destroys tiles where they go and so on.
Anyways, good job on the game!
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2123757357
Love the art (love this style of art).
The summoning mechanics took a while to understand it (the description on the page didn't help since I first I though a wizard summon new wizards into the game) but it was quite fun to use trying to complete each level.
Nice entry!
A game with the potential to become a deep puzzle adventure. A great submission, congratulations!