ostoru 2018-04-24 05:56
couldn't figure out how not to die
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD41 → Help Wanted
By snowdrama, DanielJMus, rot_god and arc1llusion
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 751 | 3.31 | 23 | |
| Fun | 815 | 3.04 | 23 | |
| Innovation | 446 | 3.52 | 23 | |
| Theme | 432 | 3.78 | 23 | |
| Graphics | 840 | 3.04 | 23 | |
| Audio | 474 | 3.17 | 22 | |
| Humor | 337 | 3.33 | 23 |
couldn't figure out how not to die
Couldn't quite figure out how to use the food I had cooked...
Cool idea, but how do you plant the turrets?
Hi @ostoru, @DraughtVader and @okacat, once you have created a turret with the ingredients you can place them on the seats around the restaurant. :)
@okacat @DraughtVader Yeah The Chairs are bases for the turrets to be placed Making an update to add more context.
@ostoru I have to do some balance fixes, the first round is kinda hard, try a Number 911 to slow them and 3 Sub Machine Guns, that seems to work for me. Also make sure to have one tower near the counter to make sure if any get through you can kill them while they stand there. Finally The Meatballer blocks paths, consider building them and blocking the far left and right areas, look for places that have chairs near narrow walkways.
Nice game, despite me dying a lot. Good tower defence mechanics, and, like you day, it needs some balancing, especially at the first wave... Super fun
@mintarcade Yeah the balance definitely needs work, you're not the only one who has had an issue with the difficulty, especially the first wave!
This game have a lot of depth its almost a miracle that you have a balance, good job!!
Nice work! After the first wave, it gets much easier; I just placed close range turrets everywhere and managed to win quite easily. I think you could get away with starting the waves automatically; I enjoyed it more when I felt I was being rushed to cook up more towers.
I like the humour and the music was great. The UI could use a little work, but understandable with the time constraints. Awesome job!
@fernando-labarta @sanjeev Thanks for the feedback guys.
We played with the idea of making the enemies stronger over time, but more or less ran out of time trying to balance them. I'll put in more timed waves next time too :)
But yeah, once you get past the first wave it's pretty easy!
@fernando-labarta Thanks, it was a challenge because we had to get all the towers in before we could even really balance the game. There was some balancing that happened after. From feedback I got on my stream that night and the first few comments, the first round was messed with to be more managable. It was originally pretty difficult for those playing the first time.
@sanjeev Yeah I definitely agree, I'd still have some catch up waves, but like every 2 waves is a bit much, if there was more time, and more waves, I'd say like auto start every wave except like every 5, having the untimed waves was to help with planning so instead of cooking in a panic, you could strategize but yeah I agree, going "OMG I ONLY HAVE 20 SECONDS AND I NEED 4 more towers!!!" is much more exciting then casually cooking towers and starting when you want. Maybe even have all of them timed but some be like 1 minute vs 20 seconds.
As @arc1llusion mentioned, we had planed to make enemies get stronger over each wave, and there was also talk about having the turrets have some kind of ammo so you'd have to re-fill or replace them over time which I think would have been cool.
Thanks for the feedback both of you!
Really like the idea! Couldn't see the ingredient list, but just had to be in full scree. Couldnt figure out how to actually place your turrets at all . a small tutorial screen would be helpful. Think it could be really fun though!
@Flatterp Hmmmm I did a second pass of the UI so I might have messed up the scale or something for lower resolutions. I'll have to look into it. What scale were you playing at?
Also Which version were you playing? Most versions(Though I think I clarified more in later versions) had a Instructions screen that mentions that you place the turrets on the chairs in the controls:
Instructions.png
It's possible that this also had a scaling issue making the text difficult to read. I agree something with more details would be useful but a lot of this was added in with under an hour to go.
@snowdrama I went back and played this again, making sure I had it on full-screen right from the start and the UI was much clearer. I think you were right about the scaling issue, I must have also clicked on a weird resolution or something!
I completely failed to do anything, until I read the comments and found out I needed to run in full screen. Placement of the turrets on the chairs was also one I then had to find out here. It's explained in the instructions, but I overlooked it. In-game hints always help a ton.
A pretty solid tower defense game, but I felt it's a shame that the cooking/crafting aspect is detached from it in-between waves. Having to cook quickly while zombies come in would add a lot of tension.
The art is cute, but there's no real colour scheme I can pick up on. The UI elements of text in grey boxes feel a little under-designed, but they do the job. If you were going to dfevelop it further, that's where I'd look for improvements (along with turret placement indicators).
Nice one!
One thing that isn't immediately clear, is that the zombies will keep attacking you until you lose. In most tower defense games, if enemies reach the end, they hurt you then leave. Your method is in some ways superior, but you should probably mention in your instructions how important it is to put a turret near the counter. You may also want to reduce the size of the zone that zombies can attack, so there aren't any off to the side where you might not hit them.
Another thing that was not obvious is where the zombies would walk. The first time I played they walked through the center, which I didn't realize they would do. So next time I put all my turrets in the center, and then on wave 2 some walked on the left side.
I feel like you could have done more with the cooking mechanic. At the moment, cooking feels functionally equivalent to clicking a buy button, except with extra steps. One option would be for enemies to drop ingredients instead of money. I'm sure there's lots of good possibilities to make the cooking mechanic more relevant to the gameplay.
So the game isn't perfect, but you got a LOT done in one weekend. Even just having multiple tower types puts you ahead of the other tower defense games I've seen here. Overall, I'm impressed.
That was a lot of fun. Failed hard the first time because the recipe list didn't display when not in full screen mode on WebGL, started the first wave with nothing built. Did much better the next try.
@Flatterp Thanks! Yeah I haven't quite had time to fix it but I will asap! Thanks for checking!
@Flaterectomy Yeah we definitely noted that the tension of cooking with a countdown timer to the next wave was way better than getting unlimited time. I considered turret placement like on hover effects but I couldn't figure out the outline shader in time. I also had no real time to do much on the design side and the models were rushed, with the focus on making sure we had animations and stuff over spending time on character and object design. There's lots with like color I'd do better in the future.
@Alans Antics I definitely wish I had some way of showing a map or like some kind of pathing for the enemies but I spent a lot of time learning how to do pathfinding in the first place so I didn't have much time to clean it up. Making the enemies go to the different sides was partially intentional, in order to make the Meatballer have a purpose, but it would have been better for sure if you could see that on this wave they plan to do something different than the first round. With the cooking mechanic we weren't sure how involved we wanted it to be. We considered things like adding drops or rare ingredients that could be added, ot having shops nearby so you had to go to nearby shops and get those to cook something more powerful/unique. For example a Mexican restaurant so you could make taco turrets, that would do damage over time. The only concern was that if we made the tower cooking to complicated that it would be a huge information dump, even more than it currently is hahaha.
@dwemthy Everyone failed the first time. Hell I failled the first time hahaha! The scaling issue has been noted and I'll update as soon as I have time to get to it, I've been very busy at work due to taking some days off for this haha.
Very fun! Especially enjoyed the meatball hehe :)The character models were simple but fun. Overall you captured a playful mood with a crafting system that for me felt very realistic (brought me back to my Subway Sandwich Artist days haha)
@rebecca-kremer Hahaha Love that it reminded you of that, @arc1llusion and I have both worked at a sub shop so it was partially based on our experience there. The meatball was the best one(though I wish I had time to make a model for it, it's so smooth... it's weird haha) It was a late edition so I didn't have much time to change the level layout to balance for it. If you made like 3 or 4 of them they'd follow one path and then you just load that with damage turrets and a couple slowing ones, easy win. The character models were based on an old comic I did about working in food right out of high school. I'm not an artist, so I passed these over to @rot-god and he re worked them into the models we had. If we had more time I would have liked to do a Cell Shaded filter kind of thing, and really brought out the cartoon-y look for the game.
@alans-antics I'm a bit late, but I wanted to add one thing that @Snowdrama talked about with the enemy pathing. The enemies actually spawned in so-called "Zones", which is to say, in a random point in a circle. This is why the enemies may behave a bit differently between attempts. Whether or not this is ideal is debatable :)