Play witchy game
Spin & Spell's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Creativity & Theme | #238 | 4.146 | 4.146 |
| Enjoyment | #409 | 3.732 | 3.732 |
| Overall | #530 | 3.654 | 3.654 |
| Seriousness | #741 | 3.634 | 3.634 |
| Visuals | #893 | 3.585 | 3.585 |
| Audio | #985 | 3.171 | 3.171 |
Ranked from 41 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Game Engine
Godot
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Comments
great game, it reminded me of some of the puzzles in Professor Layton
Really creative mechanic! I like that solving the puzzles was different each time! Great job!
So fun! Simple and effective game loop and great execution. Feels nicely polished for a jam game.
Neat little puzzle game! It wasn't too difficult, which was good for me because I'm bad at puzzle games, haha. I like the little clues; they work well, but also feel subtle and like they work in-universe as well.
The "mega-spin" felt a bit odd in the context of the rest of the game. I don't know that it was necessary, even with the theme. I think the mixing positions aspect fit enough for me, and works better for the puzzle vibes you've built.
Overall, it's simple, but fun! Your art is great; twenty two hours well spent if you ask me. Amazing work!
thank you for playing :D i was hoping the mega spin could be more of a like magic spell alacadabra type of thing, but ur right when u say it doesnt quite fit the rest of the game
The puzzle design in this game was superb and I was incredibly disappointed when I ran out of levels (testament to your level design).
Only critique Is that I feel like the 5 seconds of furiously stirring after finishing a potion is kind of out of place in the otherwise chill puzzle game but I do understand why it was there :)
Overall amazing game and If more levels are added in the future I cant wait to play them!
thank you for playing! :D i spent a lot of time thinking about the different levels, so i appreciate that u noticed!
yeah, i think the spinning doesnt really fit the chill theme, will definitely workshop it!
My brain was actually working on this one! Really clever puzzle design and its confusing at the start but once I got it, it immeditately clicked. Though SPOILERS.....
I do think that the last puzzle is a bit confusing? Someone on discord mentioned that one thing is wrong with that one which makes more sense now.
Simple but effective visual style, and satisfying sound effects as well! I would say its quite serious as well! Overall, really great game and I really enjoyed this one, awesome work!
thanks for playing :D! im glad it got ur brain working :) yeah the last level had a mini mis-drawing, definitely needed to playtest it more!
I love the way u used the jam's theme! This is the first game i've seen doing this! Great job!
thank you for playing! :D didnt know my game was different from other games in the theme!
Really cool puzzles that i really had to think about. Fun and inventive, well done!
thank you for playing! :D
Really great gameplay! Had a really great time figuring the componentes on this code style game! Great job!
thank you for playing! :D
I had to get a lot of hints to get it, I'm gonna blame that though on the fact that it was late when I played it XD, I loved the concept though and the puzzles were very interesting and felt really good once I figured them out (even if I did get help). Really cool game, I also can't understate how much I love the art and the designs for each potion you make. I also think it's a really unique concept and implementation of the theme, well done!
thank you for playing & for streaming it so i know how people are interacting with it! :D it genuinely gave me an opening eye on how people perceived my game. and thank you for appreciating my art, really took me far too long :’)
Amazing first game jam! The concept of this is an amazing twist to potion crafting and puzzle games. I also got a good chuckle when I heard the "Anime Wow" sound effect. During the first few minutes of the game, I was a bit confused as I was trying to deduce the ingredients more based on the flavor-text description rather than the spell name, which really threw me off. But after I realized that, I understood it a bit more (though I still suck at word deduction even though English is my first language). I wasn't able to get to the end, but I would love to see the thought-process behind why it's that recipe! Great first game!
thank u for playing! :D
yeah i realised the word clues didnt quite match the potions itself - which was a misjudgement on my part, kinda forgot about the clues and focused too much on the background. i definitely need to playtest it more so the potions make sense!
Cute idea, but I wish I didn't fail so much! It has cozy-game vibes, but instead of a "womp womp, you failed" I think I would have preferred a "that didn't work, try something else" symbol or color or something. I also couldn't figure out how to open the recipe books - I was clicking on them, but they wouldn't open (is that because I never found a working potion with the combos?). It might have helped if I had a "starter recipe" on screen telling me how to do the first one so I could just get the mechanic sorted, as well as a timer of sorts so I knew at the first try that there was a speed required to the spin, not just a number of spins represented by the color-changing metric.
All that said, this was super cute and really cozy. If you keep tinkering with it, I'd love to see where you take it next!
thank u for playing!
yeah i added the sfx last minute so it sounds a bit off. actually i wanted to make the background clickable but i ran out of time :( if i had the chance i would have made it clickable!
the first stage was meant to be a straight forward tutorial, but i realised people didnt quite notice the hints that were meant to be “obvious”, and thats prolly because i knew what was meant to be “obvious”.
and ah! okay i agree with the timer. definitely should have added one but alas time again :(
definitely have a lot of things id love to change if there was more time & id love to keep u updated if i do!! :D
I absolutely love the concept you have here but I personally struggled a bit which honestly only amplifies how much I do love the idea because I really want to interact more with this game.
At first I had to restart because I didn't read fast enough and the instructions dissapeared before I fully read them and when I did get it it was very fun to mix things around but the speed required to mix the potion in the end was too hard for me, I could barely get it and I felt like I was throwing my arm out and still somehow didn't get it :P Maybe that's just on me though, I guess I don't have the motor skills for it.
But do let me know if you ever make a new build of this with a baby mode because I do unironically want to play more of this!
thank you for playing and ur comment! mm yeah i may have made the spinnin a tad bit too hard, i’ll def let u know if i make it easier to play!!! :D
Love the sound design of this game! Great concept and visuals. A note showing list of previous attempts would be very helpful though :) Great job!
thank you for playing and for your comment! will definitely take the previous attempts note into account :D
First game and jam?! That's mega impressive! Really enjoyed it, the puzzles were intuitive (except the last level which I kinda brute forced haha, ig i'm just a noob as the game told me) and the visuals were so good too! One small visual glitch i found, after all the ingredients are mixed in and I'm spinning quickly to brew the potion, one time one of the ingredients came back out (due to me spinning backwards i think), but it was only visual and the final potion considered that ingredient.
thank you for playing & commenting! thanks for letting me know abt the visual bug, didnt know it was an issue till u let me know :)
will definitely try to playtest more so the answers are more intuitive!
I am normally not a huge puzzle guy but this was cool! would really liked to see how these would have turned out with more time dedicated to the UI.
Great Game!
thank you for playing! :D i actually spent a lot on the UI, but i'm not sure what's the right pathway to make it even better
do you have any tips or suggestions for improvements? what app do you use for designing? im very comfortable drawing on my ipad so i veered towards using my ipad (and ibispaintx) for drawing
Gonna be honest I am not really good at UI haha normally when doing this type of art i would just use something like photoshop or similiar since i have a drawing tablet, so I have no idea what sort of apps are avaliable.
Personally i feel like small details make it much better for example adding some sort of movement to the buttons on the main menu, or when dropping an ingredient on the cauldron make some particles pretending to be the item dropping.
I also believe the main menu "logo" seems blurry?Might just be a sizing issue not sure
Those are minor things, but i feel like they would add even more to the already great concept!
thank u! will definitely take these into account when i try to polish up my future games!
I'm such a puzzle/word game freak so this is right up my alley. I agree with the feedback that the order of words in the description is confusing, it seems like you have to deduce almost purely based off of the background instead of the description (which sometimes leads astray.) The wordle aspect does really help with this thankfully. Also being able to take ingredients back out is great.
The biggest thing to add would be a list of past attempts, I continuously forgot what I had already guessed, especially in the later levels.
For bonus points here's my interpretation of all of the potions, based off of the title/desc:
thank you for playing and for your comment! :D
yeah after i released it i realised the descriptions don't really make sense. definitely needed more time to revamp it D:
i actually did think of this! but the fun in it was meant to be not knowing past attempts. had a bunch of debates with my friends on which would be better - would a notebook that appears after a few attempts be better? let me know :D
Ok, I have a short answer and a long answer.
Short answer: Personally, I think I would rather just have the notebook from the beginning rather than it appearing later.
Long answer:
I think it comes down to a few key aspects for me. The first is that this these aren't words made of letters in specific orders. The ingredients could be in any order, it's like if you played wordle but the letters were scrambled. So rather than wordle, structurally this seems to be more like mastermind (the game that inspired wordle). With mastermind, the combination is 4 colors long with 6 possible colors. You also get a lot more guesses. The key difference of mastermind is that you get the "green/yellow/grey" info but not corresponding to each slot. So wordle gives more info, but also has more possible answers.
Having the feedback of what ingredients are correct and what are correct but in the wrong place is great so that if you can't figure it out from the clues then you don't have to just brute-force it, but not knowing what you previously tried & the info gathered from that basically takes it back to brute-forcing. Plus the chance of re-guessing something you guessed already (which happened a lot to me). Additionally, wrapping back to the wordle vs mastermind thing, wordle is limited in scope because not everything is a word. Sure, it has a longer sequence of characters and there's a lot more possible letters, but those letters have to be in specific places with specific combinations. With something like mastermind, or this, it's exponential. The longer the sequence, and the more possible components, the larger the amount of possible answers is. Mastermind has 6^4 = 1296 possible combos. Wordle, assuming any space could be any letter, would have 26^5 = 11,881,376 possible combos. The english language limits that to around 13,000. (And they curated that further to ~2,300 possible solutions.) Your game, on the last potion, has 6,720 possible combinations. (it would be 32,768 if ingredients could be added multiple times. Which could be a fun exploration of like more "concentrated" amounts of things in potions because the ingredient gets put in multiple times? Dangerous idea though if it turns into a guessing game...)
Anyways, the tools you have provided the player to swing the odds in their favor are the clues and the wordle colors. If the clues aren't enough to get them most of the way there, the wordle colors have to do the heavy lifting. In those circumstances, making the player remember all of their past attempts could be frustrating rather than fun. Is this supposed to be a memory game? Or at least, how much of a factor do you want memorization to be? This also all depends on the balance you want to strike between deducing from clues and deducing from past guesses.
Okok now to some other potential solutions off the dome, some of which could go together:
1. Better clues.
If you can get like 3/5 green from just the clues, guessing is easy from there. It's the yellow that are hard, especially without remembering previous guesses.
I would vote for potion names/descriptions to be adjusted rather than the images since it's probably easier for you and it leaves more nuance in the interpretation of said clues. For example, the first potion that says "Shine off the poison" could be interpreted as star then a poisonous thing because that's the order that the words are said in, or star last because it says shine "off", implying action happening later. Heck, shine could even be lightning or unicorn horn depending on how evil you're feeling.
2. Stop the player from guessing something they have previously guessed.
Just say like hey, you already tried that.
3. Make it optional.
Up for a challenge? No notebook mode.
4. Let the player have control over when to continue after guessing.
So they can spend as much time as they need to memorize it. Or take notes/screenshots if they want to.
5. Give the ability to take notes in-game.
A little book you can draw/type in! This could be cute. Or annoying if they have to guess a lot and therefore take a lot of notes, in which case a straight up list of previous guesses might be better.
6. Add some rules to the ingredients.
This might be changing the game too much, but just an idea. Lean a little more into the wordle aspect (as opposed to mastermind). Let the player uncover rules as to the order. In this route, maybe the wordle colors aren't needed at all if the order can be figured out solely from rules learnt previously, and the potion title/desc just has to clue in to the ingredients... For example: fuzzballs can't be added right before or after lightning because they'll generate too much static charge and the potion will blow up. Or: gears have to be added last or else they'll rust.
It's definitely challenging to not make it too hard or too easy, and I think the only way to really figure out what works for you and your game is to just try different things and have people playtest it...... so exactly what you're already doing lol ^^
Sorry for the big wall of text, I am also by no means a good game designer (this jam was my first game too!), I just like puzzles :)
no need to apologise for the long comment!!!! i actually appreciate it more than you know :)
you telling me the math really put it into context how difficult my game is and how much more playtesting i need, i will definitely do more of it the next time i make a game! thank you so much for all your feedback, it has really been very helpful to me :D
THANK YOU :D very grateful for your comment!!!
Really fun spin on the wordle gameplay. I love potion mixing games and I think this came out really nice. I loved the hints given around the cauldron, made it feel like a puzzle game as well. My only feedback would be it would be cool if you just click the ingredients one by one and then press a "mix" button. This might hurt the theming a little bit but I think this would help the game flow a little bit more.
If you like potion games you should check out Potionomics. One of my favorite potion games :]
thank you for playing!!! :D
do u think it would be better to put in all the ingredients followed by spinning/clicking? i did it in this way so that there was a way to remove items as well! i'd love to check out potionomics, sounds really dope!
Yeah I think that would work the best, really similar to wordle where you type in each letter and then hit submit. Since its simple to just add the ingredients back in I think it would be best to just have a reset button (I guess that would be like dumping the potion?)
i see the vision! thank you for letting me know ur thoughts :)
I love this game! I'm terrible at it, but it's a ton of fun to play and figure out what you have to mix. I felt like it wasn't quite obvious what you had to mix, but I think that makes it fun. If it was too easy, it would not be as much fun!
Great work for you first game! Well done!
thank you for playing! and for your lovely comment :D