MOTAS (Magnum Opus: The Alchemist's Shadow)
By Salt, Sulphur and Stone,
By Vitriol, Rot and Bone,
Craft your Cards,
or die alone...
Build your deck progressively from prima material into tinctures and stones to win battles and solve puzzles as you travel through your master’s dungeons and tower. You are a Master alchemists assistant, a homunculus crafted from the bones of a small rodent and shadow alchemy. However, something has gone terribly wrong, and the tower has fallen into disarray. Set things aright with guidance from another homoculus trapped in a flask, battling other homoculi, rival alchemists, and gain esoteric knowledge of your craft through sigils along the way.
How to play:
Combine Sigils with the correct color of prima material in your had to make tinctures. Tinctures stay in your deck until they get used, and then are gone for good(they stick around between battles).
Heal-white prima material
Acid and death - black prima material.
Poison does damage every turn for up to 10 turns.
Death-does damage right away.
Combine sigils into potions to increase their effects, though sigils can be played directly.
Discord Handles:
Composer & Sound effects: xDull
Art: StickySoup
Shaders: Melonyyy!
Programming: ALDN
Game Designer: penny4urcode
Contact E-Mail/Links:
Art: https://www.artstation.com/art-lipinski
art.lipinskyi@gmail.com
Music/Sound effects:https://soundcloud.com/mkttl/sets/game-jam-shadows-alchemy
Development log
- No More Sigils for Ants!10 days ago
- Capsule art progress15 days ago
- Squishing Bugs34 days ago
Comments
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Very cool. Great pixel art, and a really cool concept that I don't think I've really seen before.
Fun game! Enjoyed the experience, keep up the great work!
Posted a reply on youtube & liked your video!
I really like the game, I really like how the battle system is easy to understand and how you can stack ingredients to supercharge a potion (tho most of the time that's not useful except for damage) and I can't wait to see more of it!
Two things though: One, the game is too easy to take advantage of. What I mean, is that by making a loop of damage + healing, I get the result of winning against the enemy without any risk of losing. By allowing you to make only 1 brew per round would make the game considerably more challenging already, since you wouldn't be able to exploit it
Second, the game has a weird AI. I don't know how the enemies work, but going by the assumption that they have the same amount of tools as we do, they don't really show doing anything besides damage, which wouldn't be a big of a problem, if it weren't for the fact many times they spend turns doing anything. I thought they'd be preparing a super potion, but nothing like that, just putting stuff int he cauldron without doing anything. An idea would be to give the enemy the same options you have but I don't know how feasible that is in coding
Yep-this is a game jam version built in 2 weeks with only a few minor kinks fixed at this point, working on a major overhaul, but our main programmer walked away from the project(school/life commitments), so we're in the process of recruiting/getting a second one up to speed and I may be assuming more of this role. Thanks so much for playing!
like always, i didn't read the instructions, certain that i'd know what to do. i picked a fight with the brown toad, and threw black and white cards into a pot, along with a few sigils. i refined, and extracted, refined, and extracted, repeating this process several times. i was going to make the fattest potion in existence, and kill this bitch ass toad. however... nothing happened. i didn't make any potion, and then the toad killed me. astounded that i had died, i ended the run, and returned to the game's main menu. although this may seem like a somewhat unremarkable anecdote, it actually offers a fairly accurate view into how i live my daily life. when confronted with something that requires me to read instructions of some sort, i don't. it's not that i don't know how to read, i just choose not to, and in the process i suffer the consequences. for example, just last week i was gifted a futon from ikea by a friend of mine. when i opened the box, i realized that it was in pieces, and that i would have to read the manual to put it together. instead, i threw that shit away, and tried to build it myself. i failed, and now when friends come over to my place, and lay their eyes upon my futon, i tell them that it's an abstract piece of modern art that i had bought. although i have struggled throughout my life as a result of my refusal to read, i'm not going to change. in fact, i refuse to change. i will not become one of the reading sheep. basically, i just wanted to ask you to please, make this game more accessible to people who don't want to read instructions. thanks.
The amount and time and effort you put into this is appreciated, thank you for showing an interest! We built this in 2 weeks for a game jam and it definitely needs polish, and a tutorial. If done properly, it could be played by people who don't read ikea instructions (would be a huge advantage if we ever get to the point where it needed localization). Was hoping to push up an update this week, life got in the way.
Great style
Thank you!
nice work, keen to see where this goes!
Thanks for playing!
Wow the pixel art and character design for this game is off the charts amazing. The mixing system is super interesting too.
Although I got super confused at first because even after reading the instructions in the game and on the game page I still couldn't figure out what the hell I was supposed to do. I just did random mixtures until I realised there was a sigil specifically for bottling the potion to use it and you had to combine the elements first THEN bottle it to use.
I really like the combination system but I don't get why bottling it has to be integrated like that, I feel like it should just be separate and take from a limited number of bottles per round or something. Having it as a sigil SUPER confused me.
Regardless once I figured it out the game became super easy haha. Just pump everything into death as much as possible and heal as much as you can if you need to. Chuck some poison on there round 1 if you can too to make it a little easier. I'd be very keen to see where this went given more complex battles and combinations.
As I said at the top the pixel art is fantastic I love everything from the menus / UI / characters / environments. It's all fantastic and the character designs are so cool!
The music is pretty intense too, when the "HEEEEEEYAAAAAAAH" kicked in I was like "okay okay I see where we're going with these vibes" very cool stuff.
I'd be keen to revisit the game in the future if you plan to do any updates after the jam. The system and art are really cool but once you figure out how the crafting works it kinda loses all strategy and you can just dumb-brain attack/heal as needed.
Still I had a ton of fun with the game and managed to beat all the fights no problem. Give me more!
I really like this game! I kinda guessed how to do it, but I really like the combat! The art and music are great! I did run into an issue where the enemy left stuff in the cauldron and then I couldn't do anything on my turn :( I beat the first guy, then the second guy did this. I can't wait to see how this game evolves after the judging!
Thanks so much for play! We hope to squish some bugs and have high hopes for this long term.
When the music hits in the main menu! I loved it. Art style is very fun!
My general "how-to":
1.) Select the type of spell you wish to use (Heal, Damage, Posion)
2.) Insert Prima Material to power the spell.
3.) Hit "refine" to distill it down into the magical essence.
4.) Place a bottle onto the refinement machine.
5.) Extract into bottle.
6.) Slam the enemy with the black bottle.
Tips:
1.) The more prima, the more heal / damage output generated. (Number of spells don't seem to matter)
Thanks! The prima material has to match color, though right now we only have 2 (black =acid/ death, white =heal). Thanks so much for playing! there's one other small trick you might have missed.
Sigils can be dragged on to enemies/characters for effects as well