Black Cat Apothecary by Omiya Games
You play as an female apothecary during the Salem Witch era. You're trying to balance between keeping your head on your shoulders(since your medicine seem too effective and magical in nature) and helping the townspeople (without the medicine they won't survive). How selfless or selfish will you be?
| Version | For Judging? | Date | Description | |--- |--- |--- |--- | | v1.0 | Yes | 10/4/21 | Second upload, fixing a terrible soft-lock from the first build. |
Ratings
| Overall | 908th | 3.405⭐ | 39🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 1090th | 3.097⭐ | 38🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 480th | 3.568⭐ | 39🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 1062th | 3.184⭐ | 40🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 1037th | 3.269⭐ | 41🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 781th | 2.853⭐ | 36🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 540th | 3.595⭐ | 39🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 23🗳️ | 53🗨️ |
After dying the first time, it was easy to find a strategy to "win" though. I managed to survive to "retirement" on my second play-through, which left me with little to no motivation to play further.
It was fun, albeit brief. The entry overall is quite polished. I missed a sense of progression or "time passing" at least. A visible goal (like survive a year, with some time-skip in between) would also have helped a bit to raise the stakes or create tension beyond the dialogue.
I really liked it! Very original take on the theme.
I want to be clear that I'm not saying the direction you've suggesting is wrong or bad at all: in fact, I personally think that would be a very cool game! That said, it's a bit different from what our team initially intended. I ask the above question because, at least for me, I want to better understand how we've created this game design vs expectation disconnect so we can improve the presentation in both this and in future games we develop.
For context: as I understood @sunshiner's game idea, the original intent was to focus on emerging character stories, and using that to gauge whether you want to help them or not. In that sense, the cheatsheet is a deliberate feature: it shifts the focus away from the potions, and more into the customers themselves. Still, I confess that all of us in the team had at least one day during this Jam that we weren't available in, so the game's polish level is certainly not at where we've hoped it'd to be.
Again, thank you for your valuable feedback!
I think it's interesting that you survive if you wait longer to heal people and that you're not too effective. It kind of feels like a loss to me though, even if you survive, if you had to sacrifice someone else's well being to do so. I think I'd rather go through with how I played through the first time though hard to say how one might respond in a situation in real life.
I liked the character art and how they were somehow idealized? It was like realistic but at the same not with slightly adjusted proportions, like hyperreal. Really made me pay attention to the faces more haha.
Nice job!
I think a bit more polish around the endings would help sell it a bit better, but you can't ask for too terribly much during LD. This would certainly be worth playing around with a bit more in a post LD version. I think there's a lot of potential here; it just needs a bit more time to bake.
Nice work!