SPELLBINDER by eugene-b
SPELLBINDER ↓↓↓PLEASE PLAY ON ITCH.IO↓↓↓
https://nadiapixel.itch.io/spellbinder
Move - WASD
Fly - Space and WASD (we strongly recommend to fly!)
Interact - E
Drag and drop for elements in the book
Buttons 'Next warrior' and 'To the battle'
In SPELLBINDER, take on the role of a charming witch as she flies around her enchanted island, collecting elements to conjure her own army and valiant warriors. As she brews up her magical concoctions, hordes of enemy monsters descend upon her castle, looking to seize it. Beat your enemies and defend your castle! Gather your grimoires and potions, because the witching hour is upon us!
How to Play:
Collect Elements: Explore altars on the island to gather water, fire, wood, stone, and air elements by clicking 'E'. You must be on foot (not flying). If you are stuck, just fly to some open-space area and land there.
Choose Your Warriors: Select your first warrior on the left page of the book by clicking the arrows.
Add Effects: Drag the elements into the "Defence" and "Attack" spots to add effects.
Select Next Warrior: Press "Next Warrior" and repeat the same action for your second warrior.
Battle: When ready, send your warriors to fight by clicking "To the Battle". Protect your island!
P.S. The outcome of the battle depends on how well your warriors are supplied with elements. The more diverse elements they have, the higher your chances of winning.
P.P.S. If you are stuck on the map, activate flying by clicking 'Space'
Credits:
Programming, game design -- twitter.com/jackofall_tr zoych.itch.io/
Game design, game art -- Nadia Kazakovtseva https://www.behance.net/nadiakazakovtseva
Programming, game design -- reddit.com/user/ThunderCatOfDum (sw enthusiast)
Sound designer & Composer -- Michael Fomin https://www.instagram.com/m.schlg



| Link | https://nadiapixel.itch.io/spellbinder |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/spellbinder |
Ratings
| Overall | 1080th | 3.026⭐ | 41🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 1190th | 2.436⭐ | 41🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 1078th | 2.744⭐ | 41🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 552th | 3.718⭐ | 41🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 212th | 4.25⭐ | 42🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 433th | 3.474⭐ | 41🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 1041th | 1.814⭐ | 37🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 647th | 3.487⭐ | 41🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 70🗳️ | 72🗨️ |

Unfortunately when I play via the zipfile, I see the purple spell book and press PLAY, and then it goes black, but the music still plays, seems to be a bug, maybe you can fix and reupload?
At the same time, the game boasts a fantastic visual and audio design.
These graphics are unbelievable—truly incredible and spectacular, especially the dragon. It's not just this dragon (which would take me over a week to create, and at just 1% of this quality), but the entire visual aspect of the game. Furthermore, the game is very enjoyable, and the combat sequences are well-executed. To offer a suggestion, I would make the tutorial a bit more guided, as I initially found it difficult to understand. Apart from this minor point, I must extend my congratulations to the two developers. What a great game, congratulations!
I couldn't exactly tell what was going on with the summoning battle, but I presume when the monster was flashing red they were being attacked. Health bar and maybe an attack animation would be nice, I'm sure you intended more but ran out of time. Also when flying or walking I ended up bumping into collision boxes that were too big, like for the dragon, etc. Just some tweaking making them smaller and more accurate would go a far away.
Overall amazing work, don't know how you got all that really high quality artwork done in such a short time!
My hero is stuck at the feet of a dragon.
I couldn't get out. Huh! Thanks for the game
Sometimes something is blocking my character and it's hard to understand where I can walk.
I will say, the game is pretty grindy, which im not a big fan of. Like I spend all that time gathering resources to make a big warrior, but then they're gone after 1 battle even if they survived? And that's not to mention all the resources lost from failed battles. Which means most of the game im just sitting there spamming E to gather resources.
Another hinderance here is the timer. Sometimes I need more than a minute to gather what I need. So I would go gather, fail the battle on purpose, then gather more. Other times, I already had a ton of resources and wanted to get to the fight right away, but had to wait the full minute.
I think that the early levels were a little more interesting because you had to carefully balance your limited warriors. Something that would help a lot with this is health bars, because as is, it's hard to tell just how tanky your warriors are OR just how good their damage is. That sort of feedback is important to a player when they have to spend resources on defense or attack stats.
The later levels are kinda tedious because you have so many warriors to summon, which not only means gathering more resources, but also having to drag down resources for every single warrior during summoning.
Also, is there a final level? I got to level 11 before softlocking myself with a silly bug I found...

I found out that spamming the "next warrior" button lets you summon A LOT of warriors lol. But yeah, unfortunately I softlocked there so that's where I stopped.
Overall it's a very well made game with appealing art and music, very well done on that! But I would say it needs work on the core gameplay loop.
However, we miss way too much informations about the elements and the monsters.
- We can choose between 5 monsters, do they have different stats between them ? I tested each of them and they all get kill by the same amount of hit.
- We have 5 elements and we can attribute them to attack or defense, is there an element that give more attacks or defenses than another element ? or do they all give the same buff ?
- I see the enemies are in different colors. Maybe in some similar colors as the elements. Does this indicate some kind of weakness depending on which element we did put in attack ? Are they stronger against some elements ?
There are currently just too many unknown variables. That being said, I know there is often not enough time to put a tutorial or more feedback in the game during a gamejam. I would suggest to put some additional information in the page description at least, so that we can understand the game a bit more and enjoy it !
As the artist of the game I don't have enough words to describe my gratitude for all of your kind opinions. I am truly in heaven each and every time I read that you liked my pixel art.
I would like to say, that yes we ran out of time and maybe jumped over our heads in the first place. So now it is really crucial to get your feedbacks to create better game experience. We already took a lot of your advices to improve our core gameplay, add some challenge into collecting elements and add more info about it. As well as improving warriors creation process and battle scene.
It is only our second Ludum Dare and honestly I did not expect so many comments, especially in the first days.
So thank you all again and good luck!
On the other hand, the art is incredible, this entry looks fantastic. The game was fast and didn't let me just stand in one spot and look at it, so I'd been making screenshots to peacefully look at them later :D Beautiful work, nice technique, fun creature designs!
The music and the overall mood came very well together, too. I can see this turning into a much more enjoyable experience with more polish!
The music is cool and and helps a lot with the overall atmosphere of the game.
Unfortunately, in terms of combat and summons, I never really understood. We have no counter that tells us how many monsters we have left to summon. And during the fight, I never saw the stat bar of my monsters and enemy monsters
In the battle screen, I wasn't able to find any combinations of warriors and elements that allowed me to defeat even a single enemy; does it matter what the enemies are?
I also ran into the bug where you can keep clicking the "next summoner" button.
Collision boxes could be improved though, it's sometimes hard to tell where you'll hit the solid.
Well done!
Collecting goes well, and I like the power of flying, though perhaps there's a sound missing that validates the collection of an item. Preparing for battle offers no indication of which warriors have been selected and what advantages the various elements can bring.
I wasn't able to make a fight with a victory to defend my island.
Anyway, good job!
The gameplay however I felt left a lot of be desired. The collisions are all over the place making it so you are required to fly (which was fun to fly around and explore!). There needs to be more feedback, like a item collection sound and attacking sounds in the battle portion. The drag-and-drop mechanic in the spellbook gets really tedious and could be streamlined.
Overall the game has tons of potential and would love to see an update! Great work!