The Cauldron

As a witch, there is nothing worse than your cauldron coming alive and spitting dimensional horrors all over your kitchen. You have 12 hours to summon your own friendly creatures, surround the cauldron, and hex it!

This game was created for the Week Sauce game jam of October 2022, whose theme was Hexes!, but it was not finished until the end of the year, when I finally had some free time. It is still missing a lot of stuff: most cards don't have art, it needs a proper tutorial, sounds for half the things in the game, better graphics, animations, and sounds… I will finish it when again I have some time off, I promise! Until then, the main thing you need to play is understand how combat works.

How the Hex Does Combat Work??

You will notice that every friendly creature, monster, and item in the game has a little number inside a hex symbol over it: this is their defense value!

If when the other side attacks there are at least that many enemies adjacent to the unit, it is hexed, and will disappear from the board. As you can see, the cauldron's defense value is 6, so you need to surround it completely to hex it. Your starting unit, the clock, cannot be hexed, but every time it is attacked it advances as many hours as enemies around it, so you better protect it!

For this owl with defense 3, two adjacent monsters are no problem, but three…

When do units attack? Your friendly units will attack immediately after you click the "Next turn" button. Monsters will attack in their own "Monsters Attack" phase. Items do not attack, and are not attacked by monsters… they are things only you can collect by hexing them.

What's With the Cards Flipping?

Every time you cast a spell (play a card), you need to pay its cost (the number in the top left corner over a moon). To do so, you need to discard as many cards from your hand as the cost.

Decks, Hands, Discards, and other Cards

Every "Cast Spells" phase you are dealt cards from the Deck on the lower left side of the screen until you have 5 in your Hand. When you play a card, that one and all the ones you used to pay for it will be discarded to the Discard pile in the lower right side of the screen. Any cards you don't play when you click the "Next Turn" button will be saved for the next turn. If you need to be dealt a card, but there are no cards left in your Deck, the Discard will be shuffled and become your new Deck.

You start the game with a deck of 10 cards of 6 different types: 3x Pumpkin, 1 Thorn, 1 Owl, 2x Move, 2x Switch, and 1 Misdirection

The Cauldron can spawn new cards of 6 more types, that you can collect by hexing them. Chests in the game can also be opened to obtain cards or extra time. Just beware! Sometimes they contain a hidden monster instead.

Credits

I used a mix of assets from other creators and my own creations on this one; time was short and most of it went into gameplay mechanics and UI, so I had no time for original art and animations.

A lot of the graphics, like the Owl or the Pumpkin, are from Robert Brooks' Game Developer Studio site. He has a great cartoon style and many assets in his store. Music is the appropriately named Halloween Fun Ghosts by GarnaVutka. A lot of the sound effects are from Mixkit.co. The design of the moon in the cards is from Oleksandr Melnyk's Etsy shop. The main font is Witch Hazel by Missy Meyer. The rest, including bugs, is all me.

Anyway, hope you enjoy!
—Miguel Friginal