LudumData

Cavers Cantina by kristinamay

[raw]
made by kristinamay for Ludum Dare 57 (JAM)

Note that the embed doesn't seem to be working properly on this site, but it works fine at kristinamay.itch.io/cavers-cantina

You are the proprietor of Cavers Cantina, a place where adventurers and other cave explorers find the potions and food they need to succeed. Unlock new tools and ingredients to help them! Play it here or at kristinamay.itch.io/cavers-cantina !

Each time an adventurer visits, they will have a specific request that will tell you what kind of food or drink they are looking for.

Screenshot 2025-04-07 193317.png

Click and drag items from storage to the food/drink appliance you choose. Every recipe uses two (and only two) ingredients.

Don’t forget to check out the encyclopedia (‘e’) to see a list of all the ingredients and recipes you have discovered so far.

Discover all 50 potions to help all 10 (or 11??) unique customers get through the caves alive!

--Dev notes--

UGH THIS GAME. I was much too ambitious so I ended up with a game that, while fully finished and playable from end to end, was missing a number of features I intended to implement. So, when you're playing, if you think, "gee this would be better if X" I probably meant to do it and ran out of time.

This was a solo dev effort, just not enough time to get everything wrangled for the compo. So, since I was submitting for the jam anyway, I decided to get some cool free sfx in there!

If anyone needs a mac or windows build instead of html5, please lmk and I can get one up.

--Credits--

All art, code, and game design made by kristinamay for Ludum Dare 57

font is ‘Macondo’ (fonts.google.com)

thanks to my playtester Matt!

Sound effects and background music attributions:

Failure 01 by rhodesmas -- freesound.org/s/342756/ -- License: Attribution 3.0

Success by Sjonas88 -- freesound.org/s/538554/ -- License: Creative Commons 0

mixing.mp3 by artur_mb -- freesound.org/s/671469/ -- License: Creative Commons 0

Blender (Contact mic) by nicStage -- freesound.org/s/462274/ -- License: Attribution 4.0

Chicken sizzling in a pot.wav by natemarler -- freesound.org/s/338697/ -- License: Attribution NonCommercial 4.0

pixelsonthe_moon by smethng -- freesound.org/s/656689/ -- License: Attribution 4.0

Source code can be found here: https://github.com/kristinalustig/LD57

Link https://github.com/kristinalustig/LD57
Original URL https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/57/cavers-cantina

Ratings

Overall 467th 3.5⭐ 24🧑‍⚖️
Fun 508th 3.286⭐ 23🧑‍⚖️
Innovation 596th 3.024⭐ 23🧑‍⚖️
Theme 764th 2.833⭐ 23🧑‍⚖️
Graphics 376th 3.81⭐ 23🧑‍⚖️
Humor 114th 3.75⭐ 22🧑‍⚖️
Mood 372th 3.667⭐ 23🧑‍⚖️
Given 22🗳️ 24🗨️

Feedback

JHax
08. Apr 2025 · 11:52 UTC
Cool relaxed game. The character art is great and I think the writing does a good job of giving them all different personalities. The variety of combinations of like appliances and ingredients means there's plenty to keep on top of.
I did find the blender kept saying it was full when there was only 1 ingredient in it after mixing something in it, but clicking the trash button and starting again seemed to sort it so only a fairly minor issue!
Dylan Shumway
09. Apr 2025 · 00:53 UTC
A really chill time to play through! I love how the stat bars glitched out when your... patron(?) comes to give you more ingredients, a super cute and fun flavor touch. To follow-up on Jhax's comment, it seems like if you put a non-spirit/liquid ingredient in the blender first it will act as though it's full and won't allow you to put the liquid in. Seems to be fixed by just changing the order though! Thanks for the game! :beers: :confetti_ball:
Infernaton
17. Apr 2025 · 19:44 UTC
Good game! Like that kind of game, some visual indication where the player have to drag item can be really helpful to understand at first.
The dialogue add really something to the mood, because it's not focus on reaction speed, you can take your time reading all the thing they have to say
Harmadillo
17. Apr 2025 · 20:39 UTC
Nice game. I like the visual style and variety of characters, both appearance and stories. The requests pretty basic but I found myself wanting to do just one more.
Levi
17. Apr 2025 · 21:33 UTC
Beautiful characters and hilarious dialogue. I enjoyed parsing their whimsical sayings and figuring out what I had to do. Yay for lichen!!
Gossian
17. Apr 2025 · 21:57 UTC
Bit tricky to figure out what to do and when the blender appeared it took embarrassingly too long to realise it was for making potions whereas the bowl was for making salads. I love how much work you clearly put into the game though from the visual effects to all the dialogue and potion descriptions and the audio feedback. Only thing I'd say is that the info about correct/incorrect potions was too fast, as was the info from the boss and I didn't always get a chance to read through it all.
Knatt
18. Apr 2025 · 00:01 UTC
Nice game. I liked the characters, my dog is named Willow so extra points for that!
JamesGames1000
18. Apr 2025 · 01:32 UTC
It said the blender was full but nothing was in it :( Great game though I love the sound effects. It took me a little bit to figure out but great job :)
macs
18. Apr 2025 · 02:04 UTC
Started off slow and checking the encyclopedia a lot, but it picked up pace as I got the hang of it.
Once I got over that initial learning curve, I found myself wishing there was time pressure to keep challenging me and upping the difficulty. With the different cooking methods, I could also see serving multiple waiting customers at the same time, but I understand there's not time for everything in the jam :)
I loved the different personalities of each character! That kept the prompts from getting too repetitive. I'm curious whether you mixed and matched pieces of text or hand-wrote all of them. I played for about 10 minutes, and I guess there's no win condition, but I'm proud to have served the adventurers.
LDJam user 301295
18. Apr 2025 · 14:43 UTC
Nice little game! It's clear where you ran out of time, but you still managed to make a fun game.
The only feedback I could give is:
- Id love more time to read the mystery dudes prompts
- There was a reoccuring bug where the mixer was already filled by something (nothing terrible as I just spammed T after every level)
You probably already know this since it's not your first jam, but if you like the feedback please do give us a <3, it helps with the smart balance system.
Blues
18. Apr 2025 · 15:22 UTC
love the art in this one
🎤 kristinamay
18. Apr 2025 · 18:37 UTC
thanks all! @macs it was a combo, I hand-wrote each bit of "flavor text" for each character (their satisfied text, dissatisfied text, and thanks), and then wrote the ingredient descriptions, but then when it came to the actual requests, I mix-and-matched them from several possible descriptions. I was going to hand-write everything but then it was Monday, lol.
jscommander
20. Apr 2025 · 11:55 UTC
I really enjoyed your game! Great art style and character design, especially the little goblin archer who couldn't shoot around the corner due to physics :)

The puzzle mechanics are clever; I even had to google a couple of words to understand what stat it related, so I could choose the right ingredients.
fraanns
24. Apr 2025 · 20:41 UTC
The mixing of the ingredients is quite fun. Good job with the writing for the characters and items :D
Civ92
24. Apr 2025 · 22:09 UTC
Very chill game, I enjoyed character design and art :) very nice, especially for a solo dev ! Went through all the game to listen to everyone's story, I would have enjoyed a small end dialog or conclusion from the different guys we met, but I understand that you were quite on a schedule already !
MadelineF
25. Apr 2025 · 07:27 UTC
Very nice and relaxing game, the mood is pretty good :-) I enjoyed the art also !
It was nice to try to find the right mix.

FYI : it took me a few tries to start because putting the ingredients on the top of the salad bowl doesn't work, you have to put them on the side of the salad bowl. Also sometimes the text is longer than the text background. But very nice jam entry, I liked it !
croze
25. Apr 2025 · 07:30 UTC
Reminds me of a mobile game I played at some point, I loved the art on the characters and appreciate that I had an idea what they wanted based on their appearance. Nice touch of progress having a new set of characters and recipe combos too. Impressive amount of art/interesting characters
almost
25. Apr 2025 · 07:34 UTC
I like the concept. I was a bit confused sometimes about whether or not I was correct, and if not what they actually wanted. Some of the requests were a bit ambiguous, like hold heavier weapons might be strength or fortitude. Would be nice to see more combinations with effects that you can learn as you discover them.
ditam
25. Apr 2025 · 10:14 UTC
This entry has a lot of nice things going for it. A neat blend (no pun intended) of cocktails to learn and to discover, custom art, and randomly generated tasks. It feels very polished overall, quite impressive! I especially liked Gargaro's character art, heh.

Looking forward to the recipe overview page in the post-jam version, if there's one in the works. I guess that feature would be needed to read about the recipes you've unlocked during the way?

A minor typo: the encyclopedia talks of Crystalline, but the ingredient is labelled Crystallite.
island-jam-2-group-3
25. Apr 2025 · 20:11 UTC
A bit confusing at times on what is the expected ingredient but I liked the design and mood. Congrats :-)