here is my and PrinceMatchaCakes’ submission for the Fat Fortnight Game Jam, Little Witch’s Kitchen
we decided to take a more off-the-wall approach to the workplace theme, where you take the role of a witch running a small bakery serving some very impatient customers. There are many cuts we had to make with the concept, including several characters, so as it stands there are only two customers the player can get. It’s a project I’d be very interested in continuing without a deadline to add in what we had to cut to make the time limit.
This one frustrated me. The flat shape of the shield made it very hard to judge where to position it in order to make the food bounce where I wanted it to. I also found it borderline impossible to avoid the little demon girl, to say nothing of when there were two on screen.
One last thing. There’s a bug in which the “Paused” text stays on the screen after I unpause, and I can’t figure out how to get rid of it without closing the game via Alt+F4.
God this is frustrating. The shield doesn’t provide any kind of horizontal momentum unless you catch it so close to the edge that it’s just gonna miss off half the time because the controls for the witch are too slippery to adjust yourself with, which is another irritating problem.
thanks for the feedback! I’m already working on those things you mentioned as I type this. It’s too late for these changes to count for the jam, but I’m more than happy to just make the game as good as I can, regardless of the time limit
that pause bug completely flew over my head too lol, I could’ve sworn I tested it before but I just checked it and you’re right, thanks for letting me know!
I’m sorry the game isn’t quite up to par yet, gonna try to make the next update better!
I’m sorry the controls aren’t quite up to par, I’ll be getting on fixing that now.
thanks for the feedback though! I’ll be releasing an update for the game sometime soon that’ll improve upon the current build and hopefully add some extra things we had to cut.
The art and the concept are both great and (though it happens super rarely because, ye, it’s real real hard) fattening up one of those adorable demon girls was one of the most satisfying experiences I’ve had playing stuff in this jam.
Ok, its a bit of a meme at this point, but I made an account for this.
When I first started , this game frustrated the heck out of me. But as I played, I started to learn a bit more about the mechanics and really came to appreciate it all. The art is good and I can see advanced techniques in the mechanics, the problem is that the skill level to get good at the techniques is a bit… high. And RNG is a cruel, cruel mistress.
That is a long winded way of saying, “I have some ideas.” So, bare with me.
Standardize where food lands coming out of the pot / show what is coming next.
This is a smaller one, but it just isn’t fun to loose food when one of the cakes barely makes it out of the pot or the ice cream sores over the top. I found a sweet spot near the cauldron, but even then I might loose 1/7.
The imp/succubus not spawning in the same zones.
This is the thing I found the most annoying. The most consistent strategy I found was waiting the imp/succubus out (unless they are really high or really low). Its not fun when you wait, they poof into smoke, only for them to stay in the same place delaying you more. This is worse when there are 2 imp/succubus. (Its been ages since I coded, but something along the lines of diving the play area into 6 pieces, a tic every x seconds, then if a imp/succubus was spawned in a zone in the previous tick remove that zone from the places they can spawn for the current tic)
Make the imp/succubus stuffed longer.
This is primarily for later in, but I’ve found if you feed an imp/succubus near the customer plate, by the time you have come back with food the imp/succubus will have recovered just in time to steal more food. This is worse when there are two of them.
Get more than ~25% of the regular time after losing a heart to the bar draining.
This is just kicking the player while their down. If you’ve already lost a heart, that usually means something happened to your previous food. The shortened timer ends up with you loosing a second heart or more waiting for an imp/succubus to clear after going back to get another plate. Its a sort of death spiral.
Anyways, longest time was 3:53, getting second customer 2 dishes of food.
I do really like this game and thing it really can become a classic; it just needs some balancing and bets-testing time that really isn’t a Game Jam’s time frame.
Hope any of the above suggestions help, and wishing the best on this and any future projects.
The game need more powers for the player like:immunity against bombs for 6 seconds, magnet plate, spray anti-imp/succubus, etc…I have to say Great game pretty smooth.
I loved it, it was actually fun
It took me a bit to get the hang of the controls and I didn’t realize that I was supposed to bounce the food onto the plate so I kept trying to bounce it directly onto the customer, It worked for the demon girl lol But eventually I figured it out.
Loved the cute 2D characters and the animation for the demon girl was great, I’ll have to ask you how you did that.
The escape button being pause instead of exiting full screen was quite frustrating, luckily I remembered ctrl alt esc.
Quite a fun little game in its own right. I have to say I love how 2D and 3D assets where blended together. The sprites where very well done and the models and effects where top notch. The only thing that really hurt it was the lack of writing and the use of the theme was kind of stretched though interesting. Either way, it may be simple but it is fun and if you have not played it I would suggest you take some time to. Also fuck that imp XD.
Kilif Score
Category
Total
Basics:
20000
Art:
335
Writing:
0
Concept/Design
1370
Msc:
135
Total:
21840
Comments:
Going to say this, this game is brutally difficult. That’s not a knock against it, I think games should be challenging, but at the same time there should be some way to address said difficulty by the player. The imps are practically impassable, you have to either wait for them to move or you need to just accept they’re going to take that piece of food. The bombs almost feel unnecessary as its hard enough just to get the food to the end on time. Making the imps smaller (so you can actually bounce the food over them), or making the character faster could have alleviated either of those. Beyond that, art is great (if not a little mismatched between 2D and 3D), physics-based game play is always a welcome sight, and the overall game seemed to function well. Great work.
Juxtaterrestrial Score
Category
Total
Basics:
20000
Art:
286
Writing:
0
Concept/Design
779
Msc:
114
Total:
21179
Comments:
What a neat little thing. It was cool to have 3d elements in the game. I know that is a lot of work. Everything was very cute and well made. I think the game would definitely benefit from some more complexity in future iterations. Maybe customer preferences? Powerups? that kind of stuff. It does get a little stale after awhile. Still! The game well polished for the time period given! Good job