Sorcerer's Tiles
A downloadable game for Windows
Story
You play as a student at the Academy of Magic, who is just learning how to create simple spells. After graduating and becoming a real wizard, you meet various other characters along the way to becoming a full-fledged arch-wizard. Your final objective is to defeat the dark wizard, who has been terrorizing the lands.
Gameplay
Each level consists of numbered tiles, each with one of three core elements. Your goal is to combine them in such a way that it produces your goal for that level. Combining tiles adds their numbers together and potentially changes their element, so you'll have to think ahead before you start randomly adding tiles together!
The game is a relaxing brainteaser that can be played with just a mouse. It's perfect for if you want to challenge yourself a little bit and aren't afraid of some mental arithmetic. It features a total of 45 levels of increasing difficulty and complexity, to keep you entertained and challenged for a while.
Credits
This game is a continuation on Appending Tiles, the game I made for the 2021 GMTK game jam. I've added a story, better introduction levels and overhauled the entire look and feel of the game. Each level is now also hand-crafted instead of randomly generated. The music for this game was done by Steven O'Brien.
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Comments
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The artstyle and music kinda reminded me of HoMM I've played quite a while ago. I think it might need to be more cohesive though.
The tutorial was a bit long for me, I got the idea way earlier than it ended. Also, not sure about the cheatsheet being always open (except for the goal).
The game got too repetitive for me to finish in one go (got through the nature and partially the fire sections). It might make a nice time killer though if played a couple levels per session.
There's a slight graphical bug: on 16:10 screen the right column of tiles is partially occluded by the panel.
Thanks for your feedback!
Do you have suggestions on how I could make the game less repetitive? The only way I can really think of is to add more and more mechanics, but that has the difficulty of coming up with those in the first place and also might make it too much all at once. Although in hindsight I could've shifted some of the mechanics I add later on to the earlier levels.
I am aware of the scaling issues, I built the game for a 16:9 resolution and haven't spent too much time making it compatible with others yet. This is something I'll fix in a future release!
The change from colors to elements definitely makes the game a lot more intuitive. Unfortunately it makes it a bit too easy to remember so I ended up sort of not caring about elements since it was fairly trivial to set it up so that the end result was the correct element. Then the game basically became a find the right numbers that add up to the sum you want affair which wasn't too exciting.
Thanks for your feedback! How far did you manage to get into the game? Because I had added a bunch of extra challenges the further you get down the road, which should shuffle up the aspect of it becoming more than just the numbers.
I played a bit more to about level 7 into the fourth area. The dark element definitely helps in making the game more varied. The light element on the other hand didn't really do much for me but it wasn't a bad inclusion either. I would suggest maybe shortening the tutorial since the relationship between the three basic elements is relatively straightforward (and even displayed at all times). I would also suggest the restart button be always visible since sometimes you know you already messed up and it's kind of annoying to have to start spamming moves to get the prompt or exit out and go back in.
Lastly, I exited on level 7 (I think?) and the map looked like this where 7 is missing (8 was not the level I exited out of):
I am definitely planning on adding an undo button, which should make it easier to clean up mistakes throughout a level and the level 7 might be a bug, I'll look into that. But it would seem you're one of the players that just clicks very well with the mechanics. Most people I've heard from have taken the tutorial to the full length. That's always hard to balance though, so I suppose that makes sense.
Thanks again for your feedback and insight, really appreciate it!