A feature-rich game with multiple different spells. Very nice! And there's sweet music and even a rare voiceover track.

The gameplay reduces easily to spam G and run, though - maybe there could be a clear distinction between which enemies to kill with which spells.

My problem was constantly running out of mana because I kept accidentally healing myself - maybe healing should happen by holding the button down instead of instantly?

Also, I think the controls were a bit too floaty - I didn't always feel I was in control.

I hope I don't sound too harsh, I overall enjoyed the experience and would like to see this developed further.

That was a pretty interesting game! I like the idea of a fighting game where you can only use magical spells. I agree with BORB in that the movement felt a bit slidey, and I also felt like it was really easy to die. Another thing I wish for is a slow unlocking of all the spells over time. As it stands right now, there's no progress in the game. I really like the art, the animations, the voiceover, and the music, though, and I think this game could really go somewhere. Maybe start with weaker enemies like the slime, and unlocking spells and upgrading your mana as you go along?

Voice acting is unusual in a jam game. A bit ambitious even - the exposition and multiple spells made a first impression.

I was also left hoping for gameplay progression, perhaps tower defense style waves that make you utilize your spells in different situations. There is potential for further development here.

Game sounds nice, I also appreciate details like particles and parallax. The movement is crazy fast though!

Really amazing game ! As others said voice acting is rare in jam games, I really like the pixelart/graphics, the messages system, I got killed by simply looking into my spells while the enemies did kill me :P, I'm waiting to play the Post LD version of the game !

The music is really nice, I like the slime sound made using your mouth :)

Link not found~

Sorry for the link not working. That is fixed now.

I have also addressed some issues such as:
Movement speed not being capped.
Healing soaking up mana even when at full health.
Balance changes so the game is completable.
Fixing and enabling the wave system.
Sounds being too loud / soft / not playing.
Etc.

The main thing is the wave manager finally working. It enabled me to enable other code such as the leveling up and spells unlocking.

I else made a few quality of life changes, such as menu's actually pausing the game. Sounds pausing when the game does. And bees not being unstoppable walls of horror.

I am very sad that I should skip your game, coz it has some problems with frequency of game update on my PC :(
And there is a crash if I try to press spacebar and mouse buttons...

PS: Intro was the BEAUTIFULLEST!

I really enjoyed this game, just wanted to play more. Great work!

Nice game, with good graphics and audio. Controls are nervous and it's really fun to play.

Good potential for future version of the game with more scenes and story!

Damn, that is some of the most funktastic music I've heard in a Ludum Dare game, after the intro I just sat there bobbing my head to it for a solid minute or so :)

Gameplay was solid, and unlocking spells slowly really helps to add a feeling of progression to such a small level. My only criticisms are the jump feels a bit too floaty and the camera jitters a lot during a jump.

Otherwise, excellent entry!

Love the bass it the music! The heal seems overpowered , and the bees to hard to kill. Good concept and voice acting.

This is great work, really enjoyed it. GAve the feeling of a complete game.

Amazing intro. I loved the music and the art as well. Runic Forest has a really nice difficulty curve, introducing new spells and enemies gradually while also explaining how each spell is used. The voice acting is also a huge plus! :3

Solid entry! I quite liked the artstyle, although some animation on the wizard would have been good. The music is top notch and fit the atmosphere perfectly. The voice acting was a great unexpected touch as well. Gameplay wise, I liked the variety of spells you had and shooting bad guys was pretty fun. Although, this being a game jam title, you could of course work on polish quite a bit more. I'll say the wizard felt a little too slippery for starters and the attacks felt quite limp. I'd make the sounds stand out more, then add some screen shake or freeze the game when hitting an enemy for a split second so the atacks have more punch. My biggest issue, however, is that there seemed to be no audiovisual feedback for getting hit and for an action game that is of upmost importance, at least in my opinion. Of course these little bits of polish are things that even some fully released games don't get right, let alone game jam entries so take this as just a bit of constructive criticism for the future. Good work and good entry regardless!

Wow! This is... Really awesome! :O I love the music, the graphics, the mood.... everything!

Very nice work. Lovely graphics. The strong point is your projectiles don't just shoot straight, there is an addictive complexity in their path, same for the way enemies move. And enough spells to unlock to keep the player busy for a while. I find the little flying creature's collider too unforgiving though.

This was a really fun game! This music and art is excellent and it plays really well. I had a great little aha moment when I realized you could jump and spear :D.

The graphics look really nice as well as the music and voice acting. Controls are clear and I like how straightforward the spell system is. Not to mention I like how the initial spell will always home in on the nearest enemy, it helps makes combat easy to get into for first timers.

Amazing art, really liked the combination of the voice and music with the style of the game, not just using 8-bit sound to go with the pixel art. It was interesting when starting but it quickly became to run and jump from the enemies and click G. Also, the spell casting keys were too close to WASD, with no option for the arrows to function, which made it weird having my hands next to each other. Also the instructions said hold G to heal, which isn't the case.

It looks like it can have potential and has amazing environment, but jumping and casting spells with G made it feel a little bit dull. Also, not being able to choose to which enemy I want to cast the spell ended up taking life of enemies that had more life and maintaining the number around me instead of being able to finish the desired enemy and have more space to not be killed. Good work nevertheless :)

Good game reminded me of iceland, the map looked a bit like me, the music and graphics were very cool as was the gameplay

First, I skipped the intro by accident (while trying to change keyboard config to qwerty, it took the key event), and I can't see it again, even restarting the game gets me directly to the level. That's not good! One must can skip an intro, but an intro must never been able to watched only once! (I'm overreacting, since maybe restarting my computer will fix that, but the only second I saw the intro was apetizing and I'm a little frustrated by that :P).
You said you didn't have enough time to do what you planed to, well, what I played here is good as well, so I would like to see what you havn't included! Art and animation are good, controls seems responding and not too hard to use, this is more than some entries we saw sometimes. ;)

Thank you all for the great feedback!
I'll work on addressing the issues for a post LD.
I'm also planning on redoing most of the code, and rethinking some gameplay mechanics. As I really feel it has potential.

Also, LeReveur:
The intro can be replayed by deleting 'Skip.Intro' in %appdata%/LOVE/Runic Forest.
I have added this to the description as well. Thanks!

The intro was great :) Loved how many spells you had, it became confusing after a while but was pretty cool nevertheless. Would've loved to see the boss battle!
Good job!

Beautiful art and music. Overall a pretty polished game for the game jam. Great work!

Very fun game. Beatiful art for the enemies. Good job!

Very neat game! The enemies unique abilities keeps it fresh and exciting. Very well done!

Excellent gameplay and visuals! Even if the sprites aren't animated, they feel that like they are. My only complain is that it's too easy or it gets harder very slowly. Great work! Keep it up!

Great game! I love the graphics and the sounds/music. I also have the feeling that it is a tad to easy. I noticed that sometimes the G-spell is vanishing without a reason. That was very frustating in the beginning of the game. Later it didn't matter very much, with all those cool spells you created. Good job!

I don't like arena games but still, it's quite good for a game jam!

Stellar game. I can't believe that it opens with voice acting! in a jam!

I thought the game mechanics work really well, but I actually had a bit of a problem with my direction in the game. It is necessary to run around to recharge your magic at the stations, but it kind of lacks urgency. Many times I found myself waiting around for enemies to respawn. I think this would work really well as a tower defense, actually - maybe stick something in the middle that you are defending and have enemies spawn at the edges of the arena.

One question on your code - it looks like you used LOVE. I know this is a jam game and not compo, but do you plan to share your source? I code with Lua in pico8, and I am interested in using LOVE next. Your game looks really clean, and I would love to see an example. THanks!

Hey PBG, thanks for the feedback!

Defending a shrine or something is quite a good idea. I may add it as a game mechanic in a post LD.

You are right that I use Love2d. And the source code can be extracted by simply renaming the Runic Forest.exe into a .zip.

However, the code is really sloppy and messy; I wouldn't use it as an example.

Very cute game, I especially loved the cheesy fantasy intro - great way to set the mood! And the lovely particle effects help sell the whole 'mana' theme. The gameplay is quite enjoyable as well, if a tad repetitive despite a very ambitious amount of spells. Having some verticality to the level might've helped, but that would be asking too much from an already impressively realized and fleshed-out jam game. Great work!

Good game!
I love the voiceover at the beginning and the way you cast spells (loveable animation).
The mood is great and the overall quality for a 72hours is pretty solid.
Keep up the good work!

Graphics, audio, and gameplay - everything well done. What I didn't like is that the main character doesn't have any animations. Except for that detail, it's very decent and fun game :)

One of the strongest Jam entries on here. I'd almost recommend switching to learning an engine with better WebGL export abilities, because I think if you take this and add in a few weeks of development, you could well have an excellent title for portals such as Kongregate/Newgrounds.

Graphically excellent, audio is waaaay above the standard, and it's overall just plain fun to play.

Great entry :)

Very nice. Cool mechanics. I feel like some of the actions are a little unnecessary but they were all cool. Everything is basically polished and fits together aesthetically. I also liked that you got a voice actor and she was pretty good; I don't like reading text intros so that was cool.

Amazing graphics and music!

The gameplay is good but the controls could be improved, the fact that spells and mana floating before reaching an enemy or myself cost me some points, which can be frustrating since it looks a little bit random.

Still good overall!

Bonus Points for the voice acting / narrating.

**Overall impression / comments** the sound effects and audio in general as well as music all fit the game very well and work together well and provide a great experience. The narrating at the beginning is definitely bonus points, very nice and enjoyable touch. The projectiles flight and auto targeting is quite cool and was probably a lot of complicated math, or so I think. Graphics were quite nice, gameplay was smooth, everything worked well and was quite enjoyable.

**comments / suggestions on improving the game** I'd prefer having to aim or guide the projectiles myself. (If you ever played Terrarria you might remember some magical items which gave you like a fireball you can guide around with your mouse, that type of thing). That's the only thing I disliked.

Very solid entry, art (graphics and audio) is very well done, amazing job, the gameplay is very fun, good game !

I'd love to play your game, the graphics look really nice. Sadly my antivirus (AVG) keeps finding e virus in the exe, so I can't play it.

Thank you very much for you extensive comments on my game. I wish more people would take the time to go so in-depth. I have one question on your comments: you wrote "the textures look pretty muddy, rails are nice. It’s not exactly great to look at but it does the job.". What specifically do you find "muddy" about the textures, and how could I improve them? How could I achieve a "great look"? :)

Hey ZYXer.

Sorry for your antivirus acting up. As a workaround you can download the source code here:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/ihu7ov9p8r1jf9q/Runic_Forest.love?dl=1

You will need to install Love2D to run this, but you can just delete it right after.
https://love2d.org/

I have also added the download to the main post in case other people need it, thanks.


As for the "muddy textures". I find them looking a bit "noisy"; lot's of different colored pixels next to each other.
In my game I make sure to use a very finite set of colors for a sprite, and then make sure every shade transitions smoothly.

I think the best example to see this is the dirt texture in my game.

However, I also believe that "noisy" textures are just another style and look just as good. I'm just more fan of "smooth" textures.
It also gives it a more industrial and "serious" look, which fits with your game.

As for improving it, i think the following things may help:
1. Smooth out everything a little bit, especially the grass.
It doesnt and shouldnt be just one flat color, but it's a tad to noisy for my taste.

2. Try to make everything look more "crisp" with highlights. Make dark parts darker, lighter parts
lighter. An good example in my game would be the tree or mage. You can see some highlights
at the very edge of the sprite.

3. Maybe, just maybe, play around with light sources. A game like yours would look absolutely AWESOME
in a night setting with lights from the train(s) and stops.

Hope that helps!