Biomancer was our entry for ScoreSpace Jam #28 in January 2024, and it’s the last game we made as the original family team–me, Fintan, and Ellie on art and music.

You’re a wizard living peacefully on an island. You’ve let settlers move in, which seemed neighbourly enough, until they started capturing the magical creatures you use for your research. So you do what any reasonable wizard would do: send mutant minions from your laboratory to assault the settlements and get your beasts back.

The core mechanic is creature combination–you splice the front of one animal with the back of another to create your minions, and each half grants different abilities. A creature with the front of a boar and the back of a spider plays completely differently from one with those halves reversed. Your minions scavenge buildings and forests for more creatures, which fuel the creation of more minions. You lose when all your beasts and minions are gone. Your army IS your resource–every unit you send out is a unit you might not get back.

The concept is genuinely interesting, but people didn’t really engage with it. Two problems: the splicing system is hard to get your head around without more onboarding than a jam entry can provide, and we didn’t get enough animals in to make the combinations feel as varied as they needed to be. When you’ve only got a handful of fronts and backs, the “create your perfect monster” fantasy doesn’t quite land. We also ran out of time before implementing sound, which doesn’t help.

Ellie’s moved on to other things since this one, and the games we want to build now are all multiplayer, so Biomancer will probably stay as it is–a jam curio with a clever idea at its core that needed more time than a weekend could give it.

Download Biomancer on itch.io (Windows only)