lex-randea 2019-04-30 16:06
One of the most polished games I played during this Jam! Hope you get some more views.
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD44 → The Grim Tower
By drunk-wizard and tk07
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 15 | 4.24 | 39 | |
| Fun | 6 | 4.31 | 38 | |
| Innovation | 126 | 3.71 | 39 | |
| Theme | 103 | 3.95 | 38 | |
| Graphics | 359 | 3.85 | 39 | |
| Humor | 591 | 2.75 | 35 | |
| Mood | 156 | 3.82 | 39 |
One of the most polished games I played during this Jam! Hope you get some more views.
@lex-randea Thanks a lot! We focused quiet a bit on squashing bugs :)
Oh man, I wanted to rate as many games as possible, and the very first one got almost all of my free time.
It's probably something I always wanted to do myself. Graphics are minimal, but nice, and I like the conquering mechanics. Positioning really plays the role, but without, say, field obstacles it kind of deteriorate to a single winning strategy - place everyone far back, group enemies around ghosts, spell big tight groups to death. Other than that, balance feels right, maybe just a bit on the harder side. Great job!
I played this for longer than most games, It was pretty fun and I reallllly loved the music! Sometimes the spells didn't seem to work? but other than that it's very polished for a jam game. Good joB!
By far the most fun I've had playing a game this jam so far
Really cool game! I am amazed by how polished this is for a jam game. The unit pathfinding was great, my troops always went for the targets I wanted them to.
Great game! I had issues with the magic (was unable to cast anything) so ended up just unit spamming. Still was enjoyable just watching the battles play out. A bit easy to "snowball" after the first maps. Impressive with the amount of units it could handle!
Really nice game, enjoyed it a lot, the spells seemed kind of pointless, but still had fun using them.
I like the concept of being a Necromancer and sacrifice my blood in order to summon my army. I played multiple times :)
The only thing I don't like so much is not being able predict the battle in a proper way so I can't make a good strategy. I just know the defense value and I suppose I can handle it but then new enemies appear and they attack me from the distance and are really hard to overcome without more units so I already lose.
Another thing, I can't do anything once I lose my army, I understand once I have spells I can do things but before that the only strategy is buy as much as possible just in case because if you lose by 1 unit, you are lost even with 100 blood.
I like the idea of positioning my army in the field in order to overcome the enemy but counldn't take so much advantage, not sure if because I didn't master it yet or because the game is not balanced to that point yet.
Very clean graphics. I really love how clean the map looks as well as the grass and dark land during the battles. Placing troops is super fun but I think it needed more depth to the strategy. The ability to control the music volume at the beginning was definitely a good touch. I really enjoyed playing this one :smile:
The game is quite nice! Enjoyed the battles, the simulation is really smooth. Placing the unit was a bit tedious thing to do (clicking on the four-mation later). A bigger formation would be awesome. I think it's a bit easy. I mean it's satisfying to watch that my soldiers eat the enemy alive, but after the 4th battle it was not exciting, because I was way overpowered. Especially liked the graphics! IMHO it's a superb game.
Thank you all for your amazing feedback :) this was our first time working on a project you could call "strategic". We've done a clicker game, 2D platformer puzzle and are working on a 3D survival. So when we decided on a strategy game, we weren't really sure where to take it, but after a few hours, we got really excited with what was starting to take shape. We wish we could have implemented some more features, maybe a little bit of unit control and make more strategies viable. But in the end we decided to sacrifice those features in favor of polish (probably could have spend a bit more time on the tutorial too :D).
@a333 That's an interesting strategy, I guess as a developer, you never really see all the options you are giving the players :D Some obstacles would be nice, but our pathfinding worked on the principle: find nearest, go in a straight line :D. I can only imagine how epic it would be if we could implement something cool as actually sieging a city wall.
@nayaki-anandan Thank you, we got our music from Ultimage Game Music Collection and sound effects from Universal Sound FX on the Unity asset store, sadly we are no sound engineers and having this sort of game without sound would be really weird :D Regarding the spells, they actually cost you blood, so if you spend too much life on units, you cannot cast spells in battle. We didn't give the tutorial the time it needed :/ but, another lesson learned and we will try to be better next time :)
@arielsan Yeah, we couldn't really include previeving the battle before-hand because of time constraints :/ but this happens in these events :D We wanted to give the necromancer some basic means of defending himself, just flinging a fireball here and there, but didn't really get around to it, we actually forgot about him for most of the developement :D
@cpx3 Yeah we know, especially if you went with the cheap mob swarms tactic it got really tiresome. What I found fun in the later levels was the ability to place several flesh golems, backed by Energy throwers and while the golems were tanking, the throwers would devastate several lines of enemy troops in one glorious attack :D Thank you for your feedback and we are glad you enjoyed our game :)
Amazing idea, and so much content for a gamejam! Really polished. Maybe include a mechanic that rewards a player for not sending all their troops into battle, maybe they only get half of the alive ones back or something.
Haha this is a very fun game, i just find the spells way to OP but it still be very good to play! Take care to the "Start battle" button who's placed on your territory and sometimes you wanna put a skeleton and bam you start the fight :/
Well played btw !
@drunk-wizard makes sense. I've just lost count how many times we wrote A* from scratch =) it's kind of nice to write just the simplest approach and make it work.
What was your favorite winning strategy, btw?
@a333 I like getting the firebal ASAP, it's your only defensive option just in case you somehow lost all your troops, then just farm up some blood in the early battles and just trample everything with flesh golems and energy throwers. The game is quite simple, so not that much strategy is needed :D I just enjoy the spectacle of flinging spells left and right and groups of my energy throwers killing whole ranks with one synced attack :)
Really good game. Getting a strategy game up in three days sounds very daunting, and I think this was pulled off exceptionally well.
I liked the atmosphere, the gameplay, the music...just about everything, really. I died on my first couple of attempts, and then figured out my winning strategy and just kept building it up and expanding upon it. I thought the balance got skewed in my favor towards the end, but the early game strategy is crucial to getting to that kind of dominance.
Honestly, though, I didn't find myself using spells much at all. I liked the idea of tying blood to both building units and casting spells, but for me I got to the point where I literally never needed to use my spells because of how dominating my minions were.
The theme use was solid, with a fitting narrative theme tied to it as well.
Solid effort, I really liked it!
Really good game. Getting a strategy game up in three days sounds very daunting, and I think this was pulled off exceptionally well.
I liked the atmosphere, the gameplay, the music...just about everything, really. I died on my first couple of attempts, and then figured out my winning strategy and just kept building it up and expanding upon it. I thought the balance got skewed in my favor towards the end, but the early game strategy is crucial to getting to that kind of dominance.
Honestly, though, I didn't find myself using spells much at all. I liked the idea of tying blood to both building units and casting spells, but for me I got to the point where I literally never needed to use my spells because of how dominating my minions were.
The theme use was solid, with a fitting narrative theme tied to it as well.
Solid effort, I really liked it!
I loved playing this game. I like the idea of a necromancer conquest game. The graphics are wonderful and the music fits the mood. However, it gets a bit confusing whenever your zombies and skeletons are mixed in with a group of enemies so you don't know who is winning.
Decent amount of game for a jam, and it actually works. The UI could use some work, especially with more user feedback.
Loved this game! Great concept and well executed.
Definitely had me hooked because I finished it! Liked all the mechanics, they worked together very well!
Wow, that one of the best game I played. I really like it, nice sounds, nice idea, fun. I liked it was easy. Golems are to powerfull :D
5 stars on everything <3
Ended playing through the whole game, really fun to play! I love the amount of strategic freedom you were able to incorporate for the player. it made it really addicting to try out different unit combos and formations. Overall I thought the gameplay was great except how when placing units, it automatically switches between classes. It was annoying sometimes to be placing zombies then suddenly skeleton archers messing up my formation. This is pretty minor though, great work!
Great game, though it would be nice if you could see the spell cost when unlocking it, since their usefulness depends on that.
A strategy game for a jam! And quite accomplished! That alone is amazing thing to achieve. And on top of this it is fun to play, have some depth on mechanics side and fits theme pretty nice. Great job overall.
On the downside - unit sprites are really small and hardly distinguishable so it is hard to tell where is archers to attack them with spell first. UI could be better as always. Tips disappearing too fast and no way to replay them. And while the first several battles was challenging and interesting, the balance of things got too easy on the player side very fast. I can't say this is a flaw though, I do understand that balancing a strategy game with that large amount of content is a task for way more time than 3 days.