Elchemist

I played the game and found it to be pretty fun. I loved the main color-switching mechanic but it was hard at times. The graphics could be better, and the music was not really fitting. Overall, this a pretty good game.

Pretty cool little bullet hell.
I liked the different elements mechanic which lets you dodge damage but also is required to refill your mana.
I think the balance isn't quite there yet. One of the best strategies I found was to stick one element and destroy everything not of that element. Then there was tons of my element to recharge from and I never ran out.
Overall a good idea though and it works great.
If you enable high scores on the alakajam page people can submit there scores since your game has a scoring system!

Also you should spruce up the itch page a little!
Even if it's just changing the colours. You've obviously put a lot of work into your game so show it off!

Hmm, the concept of a bullet hell with element switching conjured up a vision in my mind's eye and this is not it….

The graphics and music are fine. Colorful 3D models and calm quitar strumming go together well. Unfortunately, they don't go well with hundreds of bullets and sound effects muddling the view- and audioscapes. It is an assault on the senses which I didn't sign up for.

The competition itself has a few issues:

• Enemies spawn in the middle -> player can hang around at the edges.
• Score increases constantly -> player has no need to go to the center.
• Player is invulnerable to a single element -> player should never switch away from that element.
• Enemies in the current element cannot be killed, so they amass around the player -> mana in the current element never runs out.
• No crosshair -> hard to aim.
• Not having to move around and dodge projectiles in a bullet hell -> boring!

There is a reason why bullet hells usually stick to the top down perspective: it facilitates dodging and aiming, both of which are key features of the genre. Furthermore enemies usually don't stick around, instead they come to the arena, shoot up a bit, and then leave. The player should be forced to move around and dodge dangers. Power-up or score pickups are a good way to incentivize mobility as well.

The interaction design is the weakest part here. It affects every other aspect dragging the score down. Other than that you managed to put together a functional project, which is commendable.

Overall: Below Average (4.0)
Graphics: Average (5.0)
Audio: Average (5.0)
Gameplay: Terrible (2.0)
Originality: Below Average (4.0)
Theme: Average (5.0)

The idea of the color-switching mechanic is really cool but, as Ztuu said, it could use some balancing and most of the time there really is no reason to change color. On the other hand, I like the graphics and the music is nice

Somehow I found it lacking gameplay value. In gamejam game I wouldn't really play the balancing card, but this game did not have that much of mechanics so it really stands out with this one.

The relaxing music somehow fits very good for a game where so much things want to kill you. I'm not fond of this type of graphics, but it not disturbing from the process. It's hard to aim on a long distances, but since projectiles fly veeeery slow it's not that important

A bullet hell game should really be top down, as this camera is just incredibly disorienting. It also took only about 20 seconds before i was overwhelmed by enemies and the framerate dropped to ~20. And this is on a decent computer with a GTX 1050 and 8GB of ram, so running a web game really shouldn't be an issue. The color switching mechanic sorta worked, but i think it would have worked better just limited to 2 kinds of magic.

Intersting take, almost Ikaruga-like. I liked that each element produced different enemy behaviors, from the large red fire that was shot out in lines, to the tiny blues that were hard to see, to the spreadfire purples. But after I picked my favorite absorption (purple), I just stuck with that element permanently, and used the purple bullets to refill while taking out the other two kinds of enemies. My score was 242.227, so I'd say it worked for me. =P

A couple issues I had were that the purple color appeared green on my character, which confused me at first as to what color I actually was. And as others have mentioned, eventually the spawn rate makes the game drop a lot of frames. Some of the enemies also started floating in the air, where I couldn't shoot them. But overall I had fun with this, and I think the theme was handled pretty darn well, too.