Great idea and execution! It is a lot of fun to draw shapes and see them immediately being replicated on the board. The game is very intuitive also, even though it had a pretty unique mechanic, the tutorial was very well done.
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SpellWrite: The Last Rites's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| I would buy a longer/commercial version of this game | #1 | 3.565 | 3.565 |
| I find this game's challenge/puzzles interesting or compelling | #4 | 3.783 | 3.783 |
| This game was intuitive and self-explanatory | #7 | 4.609 | 4.609 |
| Overall | #9 | 3.857 | 3.857 |
| I appreciate the mood/atmosphere | #14 | 4.065 | 4.065 |
| I appreciate the sound design and/or music | #18 | 3.652 | 3.652 |
| I appreciate the art/visual style | #21 | 3.870 | 3.870 |
| I appreciate the game-feel (responsiveness of interactions) | #23 | 3.457 | 3.457 |
Ranked from 46 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Jam Entry Confirmation
Indie Game Clinic Collab Jam '26
The Team
Nate - Game Design and Programming
Clara - Illustration and UI
Haroon - Voice Acting and Playtesting
Other Credits
Freesound.org
Bloody Stab 1 - MinecraftGamer
Night Crickets Back Porch - hdfreema
Big Fire Loop.wav - RobinHood76
SketchFab
Wooden bridge Village Wood - Mehdi Shahsavan
Comments
This is a cool idea with great art and intuitive controls, but the gameplay felt very stressful to me.
I didn’t like having my attention split between the top and bottom views, and having to select enemies to see them on the bottom view (I noticed I could still attack them so it wasn’t needed for targeting, but maybe I’m missing something with this mechanic).
Drawing felt fiddly both with a touchpad and a mouse, but maybe that’s on me :)
Submitted
Untitled Mole GameSuper fun! I thought this concept worked great for this jam. I've seen it done before, but not with the sort of battlefield idea this game has. The lightning spell was definitely the most useful, I usually got the farmers and the priests with the basic version and then picked off the knights with the upgraded version, but there were still some waves that required I experiment with other spells, which was great design. I had some trouble activating the stone spells in particular, but that can be expected with a jam game I guess. The drawing identification worked much better than I expected it to given the time you had to work on the game. Great job!
Submitted
BinRun!Cool mechanic, and it was immediately intuitive to me. Pattern recognition was a bit lacking at times, and feedback for not having enough mana/drawing left was a bit weak.
Solid entry!
Submitted
Wordless WarVery fun, some things I loved:
The concept as a whole, the death screen, the art
Somethings that weren't so intuitive:
For a while, I thought the game was bugging out. I had no idea there was a limit to how much you could draw at a time. I did eventually figure it out, but it took until level 2!
Had a great time with this one.
Submitted
Wings of SteelCool idea and introduction! Love the concept of spell-writing - reminds me of Harry Potter 1st game ^^. The atmosphere and the art are so strong here with the concept!
The drawing on the parchment is somehow too small for me - maybe add some extra space around the map to have a place to start drawing something, or not to be interrupted if we go a bit "with the flow".
Submitted
BinRun!Very unique mechanic which I enjoyed!! I was going to suggest some kind of limitation on spellcasting like mana but I see in other comments there is mana, during my gameplay I never felt as if I ran out at all and could just spam lightning or draw a fire circle over the whole grid. With the wall upgrade I was having issues with it recognising it as fire which almost cost me my game a few times. But overall I enjoyed being a witch and casting spells on those who wish me harm lol and I thought you guys nailed the self explanatory aspect, everything was tutorialised very well!
Submitted
Shop In SilenceHad a lot of trouble getting the spells to read correctly; trying to make a circle kept getting interrupted halfway though and the arc was read as a lighting bolt instead. Tried making a wall, and it would either stop me halfway through and read a lightning bolt, or let finish, and read it as a circle.
But, hey, character recognition is a tough field! People use pretty hefty ML algorithms to do OCR these days, and this was much more reliable than those usually are, (they have a hard time recognizing characters within the same font, let alone handwriting or other such. Ask me how I know :) )
You got a pretty decent game shipped out with a fairly tough mechanic to do right, that's pretty dang impressive :)
Submitted
Kin to KingsNovel and imaginative. I have seen similar mechanics but not mixed together like this.. Overall, I enjoyed it and I thought the unique concept had a lot of appeal... Mixing the quill drawing, board game vibe and medieval fantasy aesthetic works well too.
If I had to give constructive criticism, it would be, I am a filthy casual and so it got very hard very quickly for me and I found myself.. not so much relaxing and scrambling. Perhaps this is a me issue in general, and to be fair I realise now i was playing it in a window, which probably didn't help.
Submitted
Ronin AroundThat was awesome. Spell detection could be a bit better, like sometimes my circles would build walls, but other than that its amazing, awesome idea, vibe.mechinics everything was good
Submitted
Coal 4 CashVery great game! I found it to be really compelling from the start
The only game design issue I found is that the fire spell is super over powered compared to the rest, so kind of a balancing issue. The thunder is super hard to hit, kind of requiring you to mark enemies with your hand, which make you lose time. I was trying to vary spells and lost some levels, until I started to just use fire all the time, it is strong and have a big AoE. This changed the game, because now the levels got more monotonous and I was just spamming fire around the region with enemies.
I think the game would remain super compelling if it had enemies that was strong against some kind of spell, like coal miners with a fire resistant suit, a rubber guy that resist electricity and a guy with a huge hammer that could break walls, this would mean I would have to vary spells and counter them in specific ways, and not just spam no matter what enemies comes.
The writing works really well, but I was curious to try a version in which you write in the ground itself instead of having this layer of 'positional transformation'. It might be fun test and feel if the game gets better or worse, and which direction the project would grow based on this change.
Anyway, great game, congratulations! Hope this feedback helps you guys :)
Submitted
Tabletop TroopersCleverly done! I understood the task at hand right away and drawing the spells made me feel like a real wizard!
Submitted
Kin to KingsVery compelling mechanic, casting new spells made me smile quite a few times. It works really well, and feels very exciting to discover.
I don't think I saw much reason to use anything but fire and walls to contain enemies, as these dont need to be very precise - it's difficult to map them well enough to use the lightning. I also think running out of ink wasn't super clear to me immediately, it took a while for me to catch on and better manage my resources.
The look and feel is pretty good but I think it could be pushed to be a bit moodier and atmospheric and witchy, with a more intentional colour palette perhaps. It's well illustrated but doesn't yet feel really designed.
I think enemy health could also have been a bit better communicated. But this is such a cool start, and well worth expanding.
Submitted
Sky Island ToursVery cool mechanics and well implemented, the gestures worked really well for me, no issues with that. I think the mapping from the paper to the grid was the only thing I felt was unsatisfying, probably because the perspective made it difficult to map from one to the other so I quite often missed. Not sure how that could be improved. The visuals and effects obviously very good. Great submission!
Submitted
Elemidasreally well made and super intuitive. had no trouble with getting the right spell to trigger, tho i often used the circle fireball as it was quite op lol. adding some more challenging enemies would improve it i think, really fun game, well done!
Submitted
PERIHELIONThis was really cool. I liked the spell writing. The upgrades were cool. I think having a bigger area to draw the spells would have been nice as I felt like I was going out of the area a bit. I really liked the idea overall and the execution was very good
Submitted
Ronin AroundThis game is very easy to know what you have to do, not so easy to actually do it lol
I kept dying on the second level because when i was trying to do one spell, it would register as another spell.
otherwise, cool concetp and great art style and sound design
Submitted
Manic Maintenance TDCool concept! Definitely clear how to play, but a bit difficult. I could never get the circles to work (always ended being a wall) but I got by with walls and lightning.
Submitted
Trash Sandwich
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