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Tetrarch's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Gameplay | #4 | 3.623 | 3.800 |
| Theme | #8 | 3.146 | 3.300 |
| Visuals | #8 | 3.623 | 3.800 |
| Overall | #10 | 2.972 | 3.117 |
| Accessibility | #14 | 2.384 | 2.500 |
| Itch page & Marketing | #15 | 2.384 | 2.500 |
| Audio | #17 | 2.670 | 2.800 |
Ranked from 10 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Theme interpretation
Elemental fusions was the main inspiration for the game
Players Notice
This is my first solo gamejam :D
Development Software
Godot, Aseprite
Accessibility
Aimed to keep fusions and effects visually distinct so as to be colorblind friendly
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Comments
I didn’t understand the fusion mechanic at first, but everything else is really cool! The art is amazing!
Do think the player needs to be guided a bit more early on, it took a while to realize I can melee with orbs and I can merge 2 effects together.
Art & music choice fit well, do think health pickups would have been nice. especially with some enemies being a bit punishing.
What was the consensus? will you continue down the project or not? :)
Melee vs ranged was nice in that it felt like it created a lot of 'combat-based-decision-making' which is something that a few of my trashed projects lacked; the issue is that it results in some encounters feeling pretty punishing. I agree that health pickups would definitely help alleviate some of that pain especially in a run-based game.
I feel like the melee felt really good and has a lot of potential; the art style was also a lot of fun to work with and seemed generally well received. I've started working on another project that's using the same art and am keeping this one in my back pocket for now; the hope is that it lets me build out a sort of asset library overtime. I feel like the game could serve as a solid foundation but it will need a lot of tuning and probably some rethinking of the magic system to feel genuinely good so I want to revisit it with fresh eyes.
The game looks amazing! I love all the art in this game. The player felt smooth to play as, and the animations/particles were all pretty nice. I enjoyed the gameplay, and the elemental fusions were really cool. Some things which I would like which have already been mentioned by others, is that it would be nice if there was an objective in this game. More enemies would also be great, though I can understand it being too time consuming for a gamejam. I also have the same issue with the music/sfx where the sfx is much louder compared to the game audio. There should also be more feedback for the doors opening when you clear a room. Apart from that, the content in this game is already pretty fun, and it would be awesome if more got added to it. Nice work!
Visually the game is great, I like how it looks and the mood it can have, the songs are very quiet while the sfx are loud, it can feel like the game doesn’t have bgm and for me is a little unmotivating to keep playing
I don’t know why pressing esc freezes the game and the song in the main screen doesn’t seem to loop once it finishes
About the gameplay, I think can be fun for more time if there are more variety of enemies and a goal, endless rooms can get stale after some minutes despite the layout or the room changes and that’s maybe because it doesn’t affect much the gameplay, even if there are holes, the melee enemy can towards me directly and most of shoots from the enemy still reach me while I feel at disadvantage for a little bit while I kill the melee enemies
The enemies are ok, I just feel the skull one shoots a little faster than it should, maybe having a variant that shoots fast and another that shoots slow could be fun. The melee ones are ok and the red ball I like you can prevent it from shooting by hitting it. A boss or having an end to the game would be nice.
The room system can make you enter the main screen room again from another side that isn’t up, you only need to go around the 1st room and it’s kind of funny to be able to do it
I like how you can see the power ups on the staff of the mage but I would like that the power up gets preserved once you enter to a new room and maybe implement another way to get those powers because it doesn’t feel punishing when you misuse them or it can feel irrelevant since you know the next room you can get new powers, but at the same time, those spawn a little late, I don’t need them because I almost complete the room once those appear, so most of the time I didn’t use them, but the effects are cool
Also, when a bullet hits the player, that bullet should disappear to avoid a double hit from the same bullet
About the game's potential, I can say it can be a good game and also I can say it doesn’t have potential, at the end it depends if you liked to work on the game or not, or the answer it’s more if you want to keep working or not on the game. Maybe the game has a great potential but if you don’t want to keep working on it, it will be bad and maybe you will burn out
I have seen games that I thought had potential but the creator didn’t want to work on the game again and I have seen games that I thought was just ok for a jam but because the creator liked to work on the game, they pushed and somehow expanded the game to be nice
In my opinion, the flow of the game needs some changes but I liked what I played here and I think it would be nice to see a more developed version since I can see this being a fun game. That said, it depends on what you want to do with the game, haha
I had a small fun time, thanks for sharing :)
Really appreciate all of the feedback here - I don't think my reply will fully capture all of the insights I got out of it but please know that I got a lot of takeaways from it that will hopefully make my next game that much better - to touch on a few:
- I hadn't thought of the small, but in-hindsight, really simple/powerful approach of varying the existing enemies (things like varying skeleton projectiles). I was struggling with "I want way more enemies but this skeleton took me half a day to draw/animate, no way I can add much more within the timeline" - I think this would help that immensely and hits the nail on the head of "low effort, high payoff"
- Elements were one area that I was really struggling on "these don't feel good, I don't know how to get them to feel good though" - I think I was focusing too much on the element itself vs looking outward at things like carrying over, spawning sooner, etc like you mentioned. I expect that you're right about attacking that problem from a map/general mechanics standpoint.
- Looks like you caught a couple bugs, I had hooks in place to pause using esc and decided a pause screen was an easy scope-cut choice - clearly I should've removed those hooks haha. Also seems like I should've spent some more time on cleaning up audio; I'll need to be better about leaving a spare day for little cleanups in my next jam. I also hadn't thought of / caught the 'backdoor to starting room' trick - that's a funny oops that I hadn't thought about.
- Appreciate the commentary on potential; I'm waffling a bit on the game concept: I think there are some solid parts but also some core flaws that would be hard to get around - at a minimum I did really enjoy the art style / tone so I'm really glad to hear that you enjoyed it because I think I do want to keep exploring that for sure!
Also you can get more inspirations from JRPGs enemies, usually those games do a color palette swap, change a few stats and you have a new enemy that feels good haha.
About cleaning up the game, I usually see that people give the last day to just polish on small things or make the misc stuff like audio and more. I try to follow that but I can’t most of the time because the game main loop is still unfinished xD
And one thing once the jam ends, you can "redo" your game outside the theme limitation or you can grab your systems or what you liked from your game and put those on other ideas, so not everything is a loss once the jam ends :)
i really love the visuals and how good the combat feels tho i hate the sounds that red ball thingy makes :p , good job!
Thanks - his name is MrMeatball and he now haunts my dreams..
Not too bad a simple roguelike.
I didn't realize that you can apply status effects with the melee attacks until I read the other comment, I thought it was only meant to be shoot out as projectiles. The combining effects is not super interesting tbh, since it's not really combining to make anything new, just 2 different separate effects cobbled together. A lot of the things in the game lags the first time when it happens, perhaps just the nature of web games, but would be nice if you can minimize it.
Visuals are ok. Since you're using some different assets combined together it can feel a bit mismatched, but I like the foggy post processing.
Audio wasn't ideal. The music didn't loop, so it leads to feeling like the sound effects are louder than intended. Like the footstep sounds, it's quite loud compared to other sounds, especially considering that's the one action you're performing the most.
Appreciate the feedback! Agree that the element fusions were pretty underwhelming and I should've been clearer about the buffs applying for melee. Hadn't initially realized the audio wasnt looping, clearly other people were surviving longer than I was haha.
Lag on initial run is only present in the web-based version which is why I didn't realize it until after posting - there is a fix so not a necessary evil, just need to get the fix implemented.
Quick and simple roguelite game. Enjoyed it a lot. The graphics look nice, and the magic system was really cool. Can't believe you've done all combinations and have them having unique looks and feels. Combat was punchy (especially the melee) and feels good to play. Melee is really overpowered though, had quite some fun wacking enemies with a fire rod. Breezed through room 12, but I think I've seen everything. Nicely done!
Other things I like:
Suggestions:
Clearly you've outclassed me at my own game, I struggled to ever get past room 10 myself. I agree that in hindsight, I wouldve been better off putting my time into more enemies/levels instead of more elements - thanks for playing!
Easy to pickup and play, nice and challenging, I couldn't get past room 8, but the gameplay was nice.
I would agree that the difficulty scaling was a bit steep; I did a lot of playtesting and would agree that I found myself dying at round 8-9 pretty consistently - thanks for playing!