Cauldron
A downloadable game for Windows
Cauldron is a game that revolves around exploration, battling monsters, and leveling up your party through mini games!
Explore a darkness-covered world to find new allies to help you on your journey. Play mini games to gather resources, then throw those resources into the cauldron to gain skill points for your heroes!
Cauldron is currently in development, so the game is missing some core features. Future updates will add music, better menus, a story, more animations, more dialogue, a bigger world, and much more!
Feedback is greatly appreciated! I'm hoping to get feedback on the core gameplay loop and if it feels satisfying to players. Feel free to make recommendations for how to improve the game!
Controls: use arrow keys (or ASDW), spacebar (or enter, e, z), and escape (or backspace, q, x). And as of 0.47, now with full controller support!
Come join our Discord! https://discord.gg/Y5VGmHZNCm
Tips:
- Purchase upgrades for each minigame using the signs found nearby.
- All upgrades are refundable (except for the cauldron), so don't hesitate to spend your resources!
- Don't forget to level up your hero talents (especially party talents!) found in the Party menu.
- During battle, position your party wisely! Most enemy attacks can only hit targets in front, so position your weaker heroes behind your beefy ones!
- Pick your battles. If a particular battle is too hard, try coming back later with more party members and more talent points. The map in the quick-menu will help you find easier battles (once it's unlocked).
Shoutout to @jamiebrownhill_, @Franuka_art, and @LeBeowuIf for sprites! And to LuteNewt for map design!
Version 0.52 out now! This version marks the transition into a true "demo" mode, where certain parts of the game (mainly upgrades) won't be unlockable. Having said that, players can still expect to sink many hours into the demo version - it'll just be harder to really push scores in the mini games.
Biggest updates in 0.52:
- Tons of visual upgrades! From minigames to font outlines, the new version should be a little easier on the eyes.
- Character portraits! These are still a work in progress, but a lot of the game's characters now have them.
- Skits! Unlock skits between certain heroes after winning enough battles with them together in your party! These are brand new, so there are only a handful to see.
(For anyone who played 0.47 or 0.48, there hasn't been a lot added to the minigames or battles, so I'd probably hold off until next update to jump back in!)
(See devlog for prior updates!)
Thanks again to those who played the first version and provided feedback! That feedback was extremely helpful in developing this latest update! Shoutout to Svartsjuk and tunegoro (catlover mimi) for all the support!
Download
Click download now to get access to the following files:
Development log
- Cauldron version 0.481 out now!Dec 13, 2023
- Cauldron version 0.47 out now!Nov 26, 2023
- Cauldron version 0.32 out now!Aug 24, 2023
Comments
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I'd love to see another update for this, really enjoyed it thus far :)
I’m glad you liked it! I’m planning to launch the next version on Steam, hopefully during the June NextFest. If you have any feedback, I’d love to hear it!
I'm really enjoying all the quality of life changes you've added into the game. It's nice being able to auto level the tech trees!
Awesome game! Played it a lot the last couple of days and just cleared the map. Took a bit of tinkering with different teams and talents but I managed to beat the twins at 2.32k power level. I hope you continue to add more.
Thanks for playing! And I'm glad you liked it! It's always fun to see the different team setups.
I'm definitely going to add more. The next update should be a pretty big one! If you have any suggestions, or anything you'd like to see more of/less of, please let me know!
Gamepad support:
The game works pretty well with a gamepad (I'm using an Xbox 360 controller). However, I noticed a couple of bugs.
If you walk into an object on the map with the analog stick, like the chest or a sign, it will become selected and stay selected after you leave. Pushing A while multiple objects are selected can break the game.
Also, up/down on the analog stick don't work while fishing.
Thanks so much for the feedback! I admit I haven’t done a ton of testing with a game pad, especially with the analog stick. I’ll work on getting this patched!
I hope you’re enjoying the game so far!
Yes, I like the game a lot. The minigames are all fun, and I like how you have an incentive to switch between them and keep your scores balanced.
It's neat how many times you have to change strategy on the minigames because new upgrades moved the bottleneck.
Awesome! I'm glad you like it!
And about the bug you found: It actually required some big changes to fix, so I think I'm going to have to wait until the next big update to implement, since I'll need to make sure the fix didn't break anything else. Thanks again for bringing it up!
Suggestion:
For the Apple game would it be feasible to have the pace of the game accelerate the longer you do not take any damage or would that cause lag or some other issue? Then it would revert to normal speed the moment you took any damage. So like faster spawnrate, faster apple drops, faster projectiles, faster timer depletion, until the first instance of damage taken.
Cause just holding left and mashing spacebar for the first 10 minutes till you get to a boss that requires any amount of dodging gets old after a while. And I don't think this is just exclusive to endgame, maybe it could be relatively balanced somewhere just above the "slimes time" or "boss bonus" upgrade or around there so it has some midgame impact.
Yeah, I think that's a good suggestion. I think simply upping the game speed would cause lag, at least for some people. Maybe I could create some upgrades that start you further along in the game. But the downside to this would be fewer apples collected and fewer turrets spawned, since you'd miss the beginning. I'll have to think of a way to compensate for that. If I really wanted to get crazy, I could even create different "levels" that you'd have to beat, but that might totally mess with the balancing.
Version 3.2 Highscores
About the same highscore as on previous version for rock digging at 42M. Should go a bit higher with floating upgrade now but I didn't try for too long.
Fishing game 20M, I didn't go as high in upgrades as before since I'm playing on "tougher enemies" mode so quite a bit lower highscore.
Apple game I'm maxed on Health upgrades and turret power and laser damage costs in the billions so that 37.1M score is pretty much where I'm capped at.
I guess on pacifist mode could get higher upgrades with the x10 passive income but don't feel like redoing everything on pacifist mode so these are my highscores for now.
Wow! Those are some great scores! I appreciate you always pushing this game to its limits. It really helps me figure out the balancing, and it gives me ideas on how to improve things.
I actually just set up a discord, per your recommendation, here: https://discord.gg/Y5VGmHZNCm
Would you be willing to help mod the channel? I know very little about discord, and you probably know more about this game than anyone else at this point (besides me... probably).
Uh sure I suppose, I'm Morgenthau on discord, just joined the server.
Bug???
Are you supposed to start with 10 million of every resource? it feels really unbalanced and I feel like i can afford every item instantly.
I've restarted the game 10 times and its always like this but when I try to gather resources they dont even seem to affect how much I have, theres so much of them,
Oh man, I'm so sorry. I was bug fixing an earlier problem and set the starting resources to 10M to test something in the game. I've just uploaded a different file. So sorry for the mix up
Yo it worked! Am so glad cuz this game seems really fun, and I wanna experience it without starting as an overpowered demigod, lolz
haha I'm glad it worked! And thanks so much for bringing it to my attention. If anyone else is reading this, just download the latest version and it should take away those resources (or if you want to start the game like 75% of the way through, I guess keep them!)
Bug:
Trying to do autobattles after beating the rest of the game softlocks the game. Get stuck in idle-animation standing next to the ghost, none of the buttons work.
oh wow I never thought about testing auto battles after beating the game. I’ll have to disable it once there’s no more darkness. Thanks again for all the testing you’ve done! It’s really a big help
Happy to help. To be honest I think I missed the point of the autobattles between the version where the game crashed and being near the end afterwards. I guess the idea was if you grind the mini-games too much without fighting to be able to speed through the fights without running around?
I, for some reason, initially thought it was more like a sort of endless mode with auto-generated enemy teams.
Yeah, I set up the auto battling for people that might find the battling tedious. With auto battles, you can over level your party and then just let them blast through the easier fights. That way the exploration is a little less daunting.
I actually have been thinking about how to implement an endless sort of battling, or maybe tougher battles that aren’t tied to revealing the map. They could offer different rewards, or just more talent points. Maybe for next update!
Loool, I tried idle mode, and tried the auto-buy upgrades feature, thought I was having a seizure for a second there lmao. By the way you can continuously keep clicking the auto-buy button, nothing much happens, just the counter x/infinite keeps going up.
lol yeah the auto buying is pretty nuts. And yeah, the counter doesn’t mean much for it, since you can do it infinite times and it’s free. I’ll have to change the code so it doesn’t show the counter for the auto buy and refund upgrades.
Idle fishing never uses the up or down buttons and sometimes goes into vibrate mode with left/right, its kinda funny, you weren't kidding about it playing "poorly".
The apple game by comparison plays practically optimally, dash on cooldown, bomb and laser only when boss appears, just not too good at dodging.
Haha yeah, and rock game just spams bombs. Apple game doesn’t do great early on, but someone just pointed out to me that I’ve had a test version of the game live for the past 5 hours… You aren’t supposed to start with 10M everything, so if that’s what happened to you, you got to skip most of that early game haha
Hey there again, been trying out the 0.32 version, still got a ways to go, loving the new stuff. Just wanted to ask whats the most convenient way to contact you for bug reports? Do you have a discord perhaps? (Might get a bit clunky here with screenshots I think).
Had the game crash during autobattle through the ghost guy to the left of start area when I pressed escape and then autobattle:on (I was trying to pause or exit out of the autobattle as it had gone on for 25 battles already XD).
Hey again!! Thanks for giving this another go! And thanks for posting this! I believe this is the bug I found right after I posted the initial 3.2 file. If you download the latest version, it should be fixed (and because the file names are the same, your save files shouldn’t be affected).
And you’re right, I should get a Discord going. I’ll get on that!
Can’t wait to hear what you think about the new and improved apple game!
Thanks, redownloaded, still had my save and was able to turn off autobattle.
Awesome! Thanks for checking back
- Had a fishing game where the red fish were not being converted while the red to blue to gold powerup was still active (red line at top of screen was still there). Maybe stopped working when a different power-up expired.
- Auto autobattles always gives me the endgame boss battle fight 5k difficulty, while i'm still at 2k power on my team, and havent unlocked the area with the bossfight yet, also I'm still at 0 wins since it didn't save when it crashed before. Dunno if this is a glitch from using the save of the other version. Or maybe cause I collected all the different heroes in the meantime?
Obligatory highscore flex (would love to see what scores everyone else manages):
Nice! I recently erased my game save while testing, so I'll have to play through again and post mine!
dude these high scores are epic! I played for a bit today and gave each a shot a couple times after getting most of the upgrades and I didn't even come close! I had 21.6M for digging, 7.3M for fishing, and 838K for apples. I could maybe grind out a few of the infinitely-upgradable upgrades, but even then I still think I'd need some good RNG on my side to catch you!
Impressive!!
Not too bad but you're not yet at the numbers where RNG is the difference maker :P other than for apples where its just about how many fancy fliers you get (I feel like getting more fireball damage and turret shots won't really improve the score past a point).
I played for a couple more days before stopping and improved quite a bit: 43.4M on digging, 31.6M on fishing 986k apples (gave up on breaking a million r.i.p.). That said I'm certain there's room for improvement still.
In the digging game I'm maxed out on useful upgrades, having more stamina doesn't matter since it's the bombs you need to not run out of to keep the multiplier going. First thing is to realize you have 23 moves to work with in between hitting multipliers not 12 by preparing a bomb in advance and detonating midway (not 24 since you cant use the last step of first multiplier). You also want to not take multipliers when you still have moves left and dig laterally first to bring you closer to your next target. So a lot of counting steps and running back and forth goes into it. I've never managed to get 100% of the multipliers in a game but that is the goal so I'm pretty much going from one end of the screen to the other and back again.
With fishing I only went as far as level 14 upgrades on bomb explosion size which is the most impactful in the end (costs 33.6B) lv 13 on bomb and powerup frequency. This is the game where more upgrades will drastically improve score further but with how long it would take to get them I just decided to stop. My strategy for this one is just to bank 3 anti-red fish powerups then get a 4th one before I start actually chaining multipliers. So a lot of resetting to get 4 of that powerup early enough. After that you should be able to reach the bottom without losing the multiplier as long as you dont hook anything other than gold fish, just trying to hit the most bombs and some upgrades then finally grab the highest value fish which will reset the multiplier.
At my current scores I still feel there's room to get better at the games before RNG becomes the main variable in scores. To be fair I probably played more than you :P
Anyways I might play some more once someone beats or comes close to my scores or there's a new version but gonna let it rest for now.
I realize this might be too tryhard and irrelevant for game progression, just bragging rights, but in case it does become relevant for future content I hope I gave some useful insights into what the games look like at the higher end. And if I just said obvious stuff then sorry for the wall of text XD.
Thanks for posting your scores btw. Love a dev that plays their own game!
Haha those scores are insane! It seems like we came up with very similar strategies for the mining and fishing games, but you obviously executed those strategies much better.
Thanks so much for all this feedback. You don't know how awesome it is as a developer to have someone push your game its limits like this. I hope you'll give it another go in future updates when the game has changed!
Finally I have reached the end of the current version! So excuse the slightly long-windedness!
I was fighting all the opponents except the bosses with the strategy of taking them down at once with Froggy's Special with increased damage from Bleedy and Buffbuff (cute name).
For Evil Sisters, at first I thought of using Barbarian's Special with increased power to inflict 100+ damage. However, I was unable to defeat them due to the recovery of the rear guard, and the plan failed.
Next, I strengthened Assassin's Special and copied her with Copy Cat-Bird to take her down from the rear guard, and it worked.
The fight against the Evil Sisters was tough, but I had a lot of fun worrying about it.
As for the mini-games, Fishing's Go Deeper was very powerful, and once I got it, my score jumped.
It was easy to play the game, which was divided into Fishing, which gives high scores but takes a long time, and Apple and Dig, which do not give high scores but can be finished quickly and can be played a number of times.
Apple was expected in the early stages of the game to have an upside to the high score when you successfully get the golden apples. It was nice to see the score accelerate even more with confirmed gold apples from defeating poison apples and fries. After the transition to the shooting game, the screen full of apples obstructed my view at first, but that gradually faded away, which was helpful. Only Apple's maximum score is about 1/10 lower than the others, so maybe there should be an upgrade to the time limit, which is decorated in the second half of the game, with a multiplier for the remaining minutes!
Dig had the longest period of slowest growth, but that was because I had not opened the second tier and did not get the upgrade that makes the orange gems appear from the first tier. Once I got it, my score went through the roof and I was easily able to make the gems in layers 3, 4, and 5 appear from the first layer. Perhaps the cost of opening that upgrade is a little lower.
The last part of Dig is great fun, evolving into a heady puzzle game where you have to think ahead and increase the score multiplier to get the diamonds!
It took me 5-6 hours to conquer the entire current version, which was really satisfying.
If I had a small request, it would be that Auto Gathering fills up to Max Inventory quickly at the end, so maybe the limit could be made a little larger or the speed of accumulation itself could be slowed down considerably!
Awesome! You're the second person to beat it!
I'm really excited to hear about the different strategies you used to beat the bosses. I want the battles (especially the boss battles) to feel more like puzzles, where you have to mix and match different characters together to win, and it sounds like you did that!
And you're the second person to mention the apple game being slower during late game. I think I might add a few more upgrades to make it easier, or potentially make some of the existing ones cheaper. A multiplier on remaining time is a great idea!
Would you be interested in seeing more mini games? Or do you think it would be better to keep the 3 games and add more upgrades?
Yes, the auto gathering needs some tweaking. I had originally set the refill speed about 5 times slower, but decided to speed it up for the demo so people didn't get bored. I'm going to balance it better in the next version.
Thanks again for playing! I saw that you streamed some of it, so I'm definitely going to check out the video!
Wow, sorry for the late reply!
I see that the auto-gathering speed is planned to be 1/5th. I agree!
The boss battles felt like puzzles and were very fun to think about.
The fight with the mooks was a good balance of using your head to successfully defeat them if you go below the proper level, and easily knocking down the enemies if you strengthen them properly before taking on the challenge!
As mentioned before, the battles were easy because the auto-gathering was fast since it was the Demo version and I was too addicted to collecting materials and raising my level too high. Still, it was great fun to come up with a battle strategy based on frogs.
Personally, I would like to play the new mini-games.
Also, it would be nice if there were more bases besides the initial point. For example, I might be happy if a new cauldron and new mini-games were added after opening all the snowy cities!
Hey there, created an account just to say I loved this game. Super satisfying when you start to snowball in the minigames like unlocking the depths in the fishing game and trying to reach the bottom straight away with barely any other upgrades, or when you finally can chain multipliers in the mining game.
First time around i bribed my way through all the exploration and kinda regretted it so ended up restarting to experience the combat system as well. So much room for trying different parties and builds, completely respeccing units for some fights. The copy-cat is so versatile and fun especially. Love that resetting is free and that you can speed up combat animations, and zooming around on the broom, just quality of life stuff that makes the game so much more fluid and encouraging for experimentation.
Bit sad that by the time you get the last few characters there's not much left to fight to test them out.
Are the bad apples in the apple minigame a Touhou reference by any chance, since it becomes a bullet hell game by the end basically?
Out of the three minigames I found myself having to rely on the passive income for the apple one the most and it felt like more of a tedious grind than the others. I don't know if this might need some slight balancing or I just happened to be worse at that game, maybe others had a different experience. The fishing one felt the most "speedrun-able".
Freeze effect seemed a bit disproportionatly good compared to the other effects since it negates threats but also lets all characters attack behind the frozen units, but it wasn't overbearing considering there were enemies immune to it. I think I used shock the least, cause burn did the job better most of the time for taking out big waves. No idea if bleed is any good was done with all the fights by the time I found bleedy. Not saying any of this needs changing just giving my impression.
Buffbuff seemed a bit difficult to use mostly because of how slow he is compared to all the other units, by the time he took a turn the fight was already decided mostly. I did use him to speed up the sisters' fight, but thats about it.
Oh almost forgot, anyone else got an issue with the window opening too far up and left when you launch the game from the exe file? Have to rightclick the preview from the taskbar icon -> move -> then bring it down with the arrow keys since the top bar to click and drag starts off-screen.
As others have said already, the depth of the gameplay is really impressive! Had a lot of fun.
Congrats on being the first to beat it! (At least that I know of). I’m really glad you enjoyed it all the way through, and I appreciate all the feedback!
I know what you mean about not getting to utilize all the characters by the end of the game. My hope is to expand on the battling to add more types of enemies, especially ones that will require different strategies (like tanky guys that have a lot of armor, so Bleedy and BuffBuff would be effective, etc).
And no, bad apple wasn’t an intentional reference, but that’s funny it made you think of that!
And I agree about the apple game becoming the slowest towards the end of the game. Since you accumulate apples linearly, it ends up being a “how long can you survive” type of game, which can be tedious. I still think there’s some room for more upgrades in the apple game. Maybe a multiplier based on how many enemies you kill without getting hit, or maybe enemies will drop temporary power ups, etc.
One of the big questions I have with the game is where to take the mini games. Would you rather have more upgrades with the three main games? Or maybe even completely different mini games with new resources?
And yes, Freeze is definitely very strong. I’ll have to find a way to balance it. I’ll probably have to do a little bit of an overhaul if I end up adding a bunch of new enemies/bosses, so I’ll keep that in mind as I create them.
That’s good to know about Buffbuff. I’ll have to increase the character’s base speed to make sure they’re viable.
And thanks for calling out the window issue. I haven’t had the same problem, but I’ll keep an eye out and see if other people experience it. I’m planning to work on game resolutions and make sure full screen will work in the future.
Thanks again for the incredible feedback! You don’t know how excited I was to hear that someone finally beat it, so I really appreciate you taking the time to write all of this! And I’ll keep you updated with any future versions!
The minigames can already get quite time consuming late-game and the infinite upgrades get prohibitively costly eventually, so i guess unlocking new minigames later on might be cool rather than making current ones longer.
I thought of a couple minor qol suggestions for the apple game though they dont solve the income difference:
- Make spacebar alone dash in the last direction you pressed. A lot of the time I try to press arrow and space same time but it registers space first so just faceplant into bullets. Also would let you dash in tighter spaces.
- Not have turrets be able to destroy the bad apples or at least not 1-shot.
I'm not sure about this one, maybe this was intentional to limit how long you can survive. The run- killer is usually not being able to replenish turrets cause existing ones destroy all the bad apples before they fall into dash range.
- Also there's no reward for beating any of the bosses and your income stops completely during boss fights, it feels even more punishing when you get a flyer just as the boss spawns. So maybe either a multiplier for each boss defeated or a lump sum apple bonus when the boss dies might be nice. (Early game I would intentionally leave when first boss spawned because it was such a huge time loss even if I could beat it).
Multiplier for kills in a row without getting hit and powerups sound awesome for sure!
I remember there used to be a few of those flash games where you launch a plane or a penguin or whatever with progressive upgrades. Maybe that might work as a minigame but with the witch on a broom. Though it looks like you already had some ideas, judging by some of the scenery, the axe seems to suggest a game to collect wood, and I see the same signs as on the current minigames next to the red tree and the ladder in the caves, so I'm guessing you don't really need suggestions for that.
Oh by the way, lategame when going for highscores in the digging game I remove the Super Special Potion upgrades as much as possible (still forced to get the first level to unlock multipliers), since most of the time they force you down making you miss multipliers that you could've reached otherwise and it can be hard to just avoid hitting them with bombs. Maybe some highscore hunters might find this tip useful. Similarly you want more red fish not less lategame in the fishing game so can set that upgrade back to lv 1. Don't think there's any trick like that for the apple game currently.
Looking forward to seeing future versions!
Thanks for these suggestions! They're really great. And sorry for the delayed response.
I know what you mean about the dash. I'm also thinking about making the dash multidirectional, including the dash waves. That should make hitting bad apples easier.
Yeah, not having the turrets destroy bad apples would be good. That should be easy enough. I might also try to find a way to stagger the turret shots so that they don't all shoot at once when a slime appears -- most shots get wasted that way.
I agree about the boss rewards. Maybe defeating them can multiply current apples by a certain amount. First boss is 1.25x, second boss 1.5x, etc. Then those rewards would still scale with current apple frequency upgrades.
I had come to a similar realization with the SSP in the digging game, so I feel like I was trying to avoid them late game because they'd make me drop down. Maybe I'll change them so they never destroy any dirt below you, and maybe I can make the upgrades cheaper to compensate for that change.
And that's interesting about the red fish! I hadn't thought about resetting that upgrade. I've been considering changing the whole red to gold upgrades, just because of how crazy it becomes. It's essentially the only way to get a really high score, so I might play around with some more powerups, or potentially making the game go EVEN DEEPER. If I do go deeper, I think I'll add upgrades that will act as checkpoints, so the hook can start at certain depths.
Thanks again for the feedback! It's definitely really helpful!
The music and sound effects are still lacking since it is still a demo version, but the mini-games and combat in the main game section were already completed and interesting.
The mini-games include collecting falling apples, fishing, and collecting ores, and all three types of mini-games have tremendous functionality added through upgrades.
The gameplay changes so rapidly that you can't see the end of the game, at least not after two hours of play.
The apple collecting game turns into a shooting game, which is amazing.
And the fact that the performance of the automatic collection device increases according to the average of the best 5 high scores is a good way to motivate you to play the mini-games. I am now addicted to this work meow!
Thanks so much for playing! I really enjoyed the video, and I'm glad you liked it!
If you end up playing more, please let me know! There's still a lot left to unlock ;)
This is a really fun demo with a surprising amount of depth! New games and mechanics keep being introduced to the player in a way that kept me engaged. Worth a try!
thanks for trying it out!!