SquiggleMancer by ski11az

SquiggleMancer
Gameplay
Put together your own custom spells to use against ever increasing numbers of enemies. Throw a pebble in their face, leave a tricky electric mine in their way or light them on fire and watch in joy as the inferno spreads.
Credits
Programming: ski11az
Art and SFX: Spudsef
Music credited to Lightyeartraxx
Acquired from: https://pixabay.com/sv/users/lightyeartraxx-26697863/
Screenshots


Ratings
| Overall | 359th | 3.773⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 365th | 3.682⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 524th | 3.432⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 820th | 3.364⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 568th | 3.75⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 691th | 2.833⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 562th | 3.571⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 20🗳️ | 23🗨️ |
Minor bug, but it looks like movement horizontally and movement vertically were handled independently of each other, which means that you can hold both up and right to move diagonally--but since your vertical and horizontal movements are combined, your overall speed is now faster! It was easy to outrun just about every enemy by walking diagonally!
Overall, great art, fun mechanics--nicely done!
I enjoyed the combat! It's pretty difficult to juggle spell selection and worrying about the enemies, not to mention the time you're losing that you could've been blasting away! Overall, very fun game, solid style throughout, I'm impressed!
Enjoying trying to figure out what the different symbols meant as well, makes sense once you start figuring it out and not being 100% sure what it all means is a nice incentive to try different things out.
I would've preferred to have some sort of guide to know what the components do before playing the game but I guess there is also the aspect of discovering and figuring stuff out as you play the game. Still at least an in game tooltip or some vague hint on each components effects might've been a cool addition.
Overall, It was a fun experience to find out what the components did.
Magicka was definitely part of the inspiration for the design of the spell casting system so you hit the nail on the head there. In line with that the lack of explanation of what each component does was an intentional choice to make you have to experiment. So while wanting to keep that aspect of the game, it could definitely be worth communicating a little better what the different results are so it's easier to tell what changed.
Glad you liked it!
The spell crafting was made intentionally unclear with a lack of information in order to emphasize experimentation to find out what everything does. I do however think that the spell menu itself could have been made a lot more intuitive without taking away from that experimentation so that is something I would like to improve.
I also agree that trying to switch spells while in combat is unnecessarily cumbersome so will probably make the game slow down at least a little bit to lessen the stress.
Thanks for the feedback and glad you enjoyed the game!
Glad you liked the unconventional spell crafting! What you talked about was absolutely the intention, to create some friction in something that is normally very convenient and to reward mastery of the systems. Of course, with the small scale of a jam game there isn't a whole lot to master but figuring out what effect each component has at least takes a little experimentation. Would love to add more unique components to enable and even wider variety in the possible spells but that is for the future.