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Casting Scales's itch.io pageHow does your game incorporate the theme?
I took SCALE in its musical sense: the game is literally about casting scales. Every spell is played on a musical scale, chords decide the element (a major triad burns, a minor one soaks, a tritone blinds), and the way you travel the scale decides the shape: climb it fast and the spell slithers, plunge down it and a vortex opens, strike it all at once and it bursts.
The deeper idea: you learn music by wandering up and down a scale, and that is exactly how the game teaches. Players explore key combinations to find new spells, and without noticing they are actually learning real intervals, chords and rhythm by ear and by fingers.
And because it is a roguelite: enemies scale up wave after wave and your power scales with the upgrades you pick between fights
Did you use any sort of AI during the development of your submission?
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very very intesting concept and theme, its like im getting rewarded by learning how to play by attacking, this next level dude! congrasts really impressed! A+
Thanks a ton for playing :)
This was fantastic! I know very little about music, so I had a really hard time remembering which notes to press. The pauses during upgrade selection helped a lot, but it might help to put a diagram somewhere. Even just on the itch page itself, or along the bottom during the upgrade screen.
Eventually I just stuck to fire and wind, but there was still a ton of variety between the projectiles and totems. I avoided the black keys upgrades entirely, but I see how multi-element combos could be really interesting. I also wonder if adding a metronome for timing would be useful/interesting, to give it a bit more of a rhythm game feel, or if that would be frustrating.
Haha too cool! First off, thanks for playing :)
About the diagram, there's actually one in the pause menu (it only shows the spells you've discovered, but in the main menu everything is shown, I just didn't have time to point it out in a tutorial, unfortunately). But yeah, I'm definitely going to put a screenshot on the itch page, that's a great idea!
I hesitated to add a metronome because I felt like it sounded bad... haha but during playtests people asked for it to help players, so I'd need to find a sound that's not too intrusive for that.
But when you say you stuck to "fire and wind," that's actually my biggest problem right now, I'd like to find a way to "force" players to vary their spells so they play different sounds. I thought about enemies with resistances but I'm not a huge fan of the idea...
Anyway, thanks again!! :)
This is such a awesome concept! Magicka, but with a piano!
Thank you so much mate !! <3