Pyromancer [Demo]

That was a nice, simple game - just like it said on the tin. :)

Having even those short animation loops on enemies helped the looks quite a bit. And the enemies having pattern other than “blindly homing in on the player” added to both survivability and challenge.

I only encountered one bug: I managed to walk through the western fence and couldn’t get back into the arena, even when I walked to the entry area.

If you ever want to make a remake of this challenge version or ever make something similar I have a few small suggestions that would hopefully be quick to implement. Most of these you most likely already thought about, but couldn’t enact because of the time constraints, but some may make it into your work in a future challenge:

• Labels on the bars would be nice. ;) Maybe a help section on the main menu, where the user is shown one regular action screen with written labels and pointers: “Tree (solid obstacle)”, “Bat (likes the taste of your blood)”, “Golem (likes how your organs feel under their feet)”, …
• Documentation in the main game would have been nice: Just a brief explanation what the different updates do in detail (“+X% movement speed”, “+X% Mana refill per tic”, “adds an explosion to each fireball impact for X damage with an Y pixel radius”, “ fireball impacts leave behind X ambers deal 0.Y damage and stay for 1 touch or Z seconds”, etc.) so players can make more informed decisions. (I think the damage on those is not based on fireball damage, which would also be more clear this way.)
• Having a Mana Recovery of 1 from the start would avoid players painting themselves into a corner on their first run. I’m assuming that it starts at 0. That skill was always my first choice because it seemed like there was no natural mana regeneration, making my first choice a meaningless one, since it would be that upgrade or fruitless kiting until the end of time.
• When the player can one-shot the strongest type of enemy, the fireball damage shouldn’t show anymore. (Just a little quality of life thing.) If you need to keep those for balance reasons you could just change the label to something else. Like “beauty (has no effect on the monsters)”.
• Having the current level at the Game Over screen would add motivation and orientation to the game - at least for some players.
• At high speeds, the camera had problems to keep up. I never outran it, but it might become an issue with a bigger arena.
• The sounds from the ambers became a bit… much after a certain degree of monster density and amber upgrades.
• A story always adds to a game - even if it’s a joke. (“Bad #### happened. Go kill monsters!”, “These monster kidnapped your pet tortoise Mr. Grumblesnout. You will not rest until you get him back!”, “These are the darkest of times for you… There are monsters in the backyard and your parents said you’ll get no dessert until you’ve slaughtered every last one of them. Times are tough for this nine year old…”, etc.)