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[crass_sandwich]

Made this for a weekly game jam. I'm thinking about expanding it a bit, but first I was hoping to get a little feedback

Preview Media (click for gifs):





Playable Link:

https://crass-sandwich.itch.io/witchos

Currently there's about 10 minutes of content before things start repeating. Each day ends after 5 minutes.

Also fair warning, there is some NSFW language in the game. Nothing graphic, just mature topics and some curse words in the "flavor" text.

Background

You play as a witch (or wizard) who runs a spell-for-hire business from a specialty operating system designed for magic users. Through the capabilities of WitchOS, you cast curses on the enemies of your customers and otherwise manage your business.

For example, someone might send you an email order requesting you to give their aunt a streak of bad luck. You then curse her by combining magical ingredients as represented by files, typing out arcane invocations in a command line to finish the job.

It definitely takes a lot of cues from Kingsway. I also tried to have it play like a sort of "cooking game," by emphasizing mise en place and the practice of following recipes to fulfill orders.

Feedback!

Any and all feedback is welcome! There are a few specific things I'm curious about:

1) hook factor - anything I can improve on such as name or elevator pitch to make the game more appealing to click on?
2) core gameplay - how easy is it to follow the spell instructions? is it satisfying to finish spells?
3) tutorialization - is the README enough to get you started? could I maybe get away with less explanation?

[Mofy]

I tried it, I liked it, here is feed back in absolutly no order!

It might be nice to have some noises for compleated spells or faild attempts (old system sounds are fine).
Graphicly the mismatch in pixel size felt off to me (but I am old enough to have used system 6)
Is there a penalty for not releasing spells at the end (can imps corrupt your system?)



hook factor:
it is a command line magic game, thats cool. That is the core, it is like a zachtronic game where I didn't have to sweat much.
I could see a teaser image of an old tin lizzy mac keyboard one button mouse over a pentagram.

tutorialization:
first day I was overwelmed, learning what to do under the time constraint felt bad
have you though about walking through one spell first, then starting the timer?

core gameplay:
I grew up on a mac plus, but The 5 Pixel font was for me hard to read. Specificly when I had to read a lot fast (Spellbook, email)
this was frustrating, prehaps it is the line-height or leading, but when you have to copy new words like "subgicatrix" and type them verbatem...

Once you get into the loop and learn some basics it gets fun, I was burning through the days cursing the deserving.
If the time limit were not as hard it might be nice to hear and email about the resaults of my work, perhaps optionaly at the end of the day.

[crass_sandwich]

Thanks for the play and the review! Hopefully should be able to address all the feedback when I have time to get back to this game, but it's definitely all appreciated.

[crass_sandwich]

WitchOS Version 1.1 Beauteous Brew

The first post-jam update! As always, feedback is very much appreciated.

This includes two big-ticket items - the magic menu and an improved difficulty curve. Additionally, there's been a lot of work on clearing out the technical debt from the game jam to make it easier to work on in the long term.

Magic Menu
Before, you were on a tight 5-minute timer to do everything - get settled in for the day, read your emails, cast your spells - but now you can take care of all the slow-paced stuff outside of the timer. Once you're ready to cast spells, you can start the timer whenever you want, but spells only work while the timer is active.

Difficulty
Admittedly, the difficulty curve in the jam version was pretty much a flat line. Now it starts out a lot easier and gets harder as you get better at clearing out your inbox.

[a-k-]

I like it! You had me at the Apple II font...

In terms of feedback I can mostly echo what Mofy said. Could the spellbook use all caps for spells? Or maybe improve the error messages for 'incant' with 'Did you mean <closest-match>'?

Technically, I couldn't get PhaseVue to open most of the game (other icons worked fine), and only after changing the browser zoom level did it start working. I believe it's the combination of unusual zoom*scaling factor (1.65), the icon having low Y coordinates, and some IE legacy code in Edge (or in other words - ignore...)

[crass_sandwich]

Hey, thanks for the play!

Re:spellbook, I'll be putting out an update very soon replacing the 5-px high font with a larger one. Turns out it's a lot easier to read things in a tiny font when you wrote them, who'd've thunk

improve the error messages for 'incant' with 'Did you mean <closest-match>'

That's a great idea! I'll definitely look into some fuzzy matching stuff later today.

some IE legacy code in Edge (or in other words - ignore...)

I probably shouldn't touch this beast, but just for my own edification, what version of Edge were you using? I'll give it a repro and if the rabbit hole ends up being too deep I'll do my best to bail out early

[a-k-]

That was the latest pre-Chromium version (stable).

[crass_sandwich]

Just released an update with bigger text and other visual improvements.

Check out what it looks like here:

[gools.vj]

Dude, I loved this. The gameplay loop is really well implemented and whole concept works REALLY well. Would easily pay $20 to play a full version, maybe with a running storyline a la Papers Please.

[Ashedragon]

The general vibe makes me think of an RPG that released either last year or the year before?  Damn I hate myself for not being able to remember it.  Looks really nice so far though.