Wonky Brew by civmaniac

Your dreams came true - you have been hired by a great witch. Today is your first day as her apprentice, and you need to help her brew the most awesome and complicated elixir.
Can you be fast and competent enough to make it in the witching world?
Gameplay
In this game, you need to do your best to assemble the ritual recipes and add them to the cauldron to make the elixir. You'll gather ingredients, prepare them in the proper way and bring those to a proper ritual place.

The elixir is hard to make and notoriously unstable. Each recipe you assemble correctly and put into your cauldron, stabilizes the brew and brings you one step closer to success! You'll need to be fast and precise, or all will die in a deluge of fire! Just like Mr. Bones did. .
Keybindings
- Keyboard: WASD or Arrow Keys to move, E or Space to interact
- Controller: L Thumb to move, A (or an analogous button) to interact

Credits
Everything made from scratch for the jam by the two of us, except for the music track.
Music: "Sunday Picnic (ID 719)" by Lobo Loco under Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) license. Check Lobo Loco out here.

Ratings
| Overall | 370th | 3.796⭐ | 56🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 376th | 3.741⭐ | 56🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 964th | 3.109⭐ | 57🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 644th | 3.639⭐ | 56🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 419th | 3.955⭐ | 57🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 465th | 3.385⭐ | 54🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 453th | 3.67⭐ | 55🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 57🗳️ | 97🗨️ |
But a bit of confusion - that's part of the design. We wanted the player to figure some things out on his own (like how to prepare each ingredient). You are supposed to run around confused before you can figure out what goes where and get a handle on things - just like a real life crazy witch apprentice would :wink:
I like your game very much. Animations are great done. Congratulations on the contribution.
That being said, the speed at which to prepare the different ingredients may just be a tad bit too fast, considering how taxing it is to the brain to just think of how to process these, let's say "exotic" materials in the first place, especially if you never saw them pop up before.
Overall though, it felt like a very complete game, and I absolutely love the creativity that must've gone into this game :D
On a sidenote: I love how I'm able to recognize your games by the artstyle alone by now!
The graphics are well produced, I liked the visuals in general.
The sound is fun, with nice music.
And the gameplay is fun too, although I had a little trouble understanding the order in which I was supposed to manipulate the recipe items. But nothing that got in the way of my experience.
Overall I thought it was a good game!
Good work!
i think combining various ingredients together in the ritual circles was a cool idea.
i think the three different ingredient prep stations didn't add a lot to the game, since they were all so close together, and had the exact same interaction, there was no motivation for actually learning which ingredient went with with prep station, and consequence for getting it wrong, since it would just make the "nope" sound, and move on to the next one, without losing much time. if you had spaced them out a bit more, it would have cost more time to get it wrong, which would have been more motivation to learn them. also, while some of them made sense, others didn't like grinding the feather looking thing, or boiling cobwebs. with no intuitive connection between them, that also made it seem more like a minor frustration than a fun mechanic.
for the opening cutscene, i would have appreciated a button that simply advanced the dialogue right way, instead of either skipping it entirely, or waiting the full duration of each dialogue sentence.
i also think that having some kind of progress meter would have been good. i felt totally blind as i played, not knowing what goal i was pursuing, or even if there was a goal, or if it would go on forever. that motivated me less to keep trying again, when i wasn't sure how much progress i had made in the previous run.
on the score screen, it said i had "00:01", and par was "05:00" or something. that didn't make any sense to me, i definitely played for more than one second. was 5 minutes supposed to be the duration of the game? or was there a certain number of recipes i had to successfully brew?
Progress indicator would be nice, but not sure how to present such a thing. Just a progress bar is not great imho. Maybe an old clock in the corner or a window indicating time of day, and player goal is to get to the morning without totally screwing up. I guess, a progress bar under cauldron could work too.
The thing about time, PAR time is supposed to indicate average competent time of completion, which I calculated from my best run +30 seconds. It's an incentive for players to beat it, if they want to play again. 00:01 however is strange, I didn't see that bug happening until you reported. It should show your play time for the successfully completed run or --:--:--. I'll check it out. And thanks again!
It's overcooked for cultists/witches!
If you’d like to rewatch the playthrough, you can find it here:
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1172268556?t=2h6m51s
Good luck on your ratings, see you next LD! :D
💜 Elysia Griffin AKA Button Feedback Lady
https://www.twitch.tv/elysiagriffin
I finally had the time to come back and rate everything I played so far!
Here is a link to the vod of the review if you wish to see it again: https://www.youtube.be/watch?v=1gUA0Q2dn6I&t=1080s
The game really turned out to be attractive, a separate respect for the art style)
It seems to me that this is a worthy result for the work done in such a short time.
As for the downsides, I think what lacked the most was some kind of global progression indicator to know whether we're close or not to finishing the potion. Also, small detail but could have been nice to be able to fasten the intro's dialogues by being able to skip to the next dialogue line early as the time for reading felt a bit long.