Orb of Life

noobexception 2019-04-29 10:13

Enjoyable!

I see that you've based it on Brackeys TD tutorial, right?

You've added some cool mechanics, it is fun to play :slight_smile: I understand that it is meant to be a clicker, but I felt a bit overwhelmed with speed of the enemies and short lifespan of turrets.

I have to complain about lack of pause menu - if you want to pause or exit the game during gameplay it is impossible and annoys a bit.

Overall, as it's your first submission - It's well done, continue with learning! :wink:

gcttirth 2019-04-29 10:42

@noobexception

Yes! I have been learning to make a TD through Brackeys' tutorial, and felt like Ludum Dare would be a good experience to implement my learnings into it. I plan to make a post about this experience in the future. I wanted to credit him (and a lot of other ppl, I maintain a list) but figured I would do that in a diff post.

Your feedback about the difficulty of the game is on point. Even I haven't been able to get past Ascension 4 in the limited time I have played the game. I had planned to balance out the game a lot more, but it took me a long time to implement the upgrades (which might still be buggy). I had read about keeping the scope "small", but I learned that lesson first-hand now :D

Pause menu!!!! Not going to lie, I completely forgot about it! It should have been fairly easy to make a pause menu with ways to adjust the volume of the effects/music now that I think about it.

Thank you for your feedback. Can't wait to learn a lot and participate in the future gamejams and LDs!

mantou 2019-04-29 11:59

It's very interesting! I love it!

QQ截图20190429195804.png

fatcrow 2019-04-30 06:01

Nice game, keep up the good work! :thumbsup:

victorcrafty 2019-04-30 07:15

Nice game. I like the mechanics and was fun to play it. The game was challenging , maybe you chould at the start give some time for player to put orbs. also it fits the theme. You did a great job. Would like to see more games made by you!

shp 2019-04-30 08:45

I like the combination of clicker and tower defense, maybe the implementation is a bit basic but it worked

appix 2019-04-30 15:54

Simple and interesting tower defense game. It fits perfectly with the theme

afroant 2019-04-30 16:03

Very cool! Got 22 points! Had a blast playing. My only complaints were more time to do things (build time between waves, a chance to see when orbs were depleted). Audio could use some tweaking, especially the too-short movement. Overall, good job!

madbarron 2019-04-30 16:19

Simple but effective graphics and mechanics. Well done! Pace is a little too quick for my tastes, I found it very difficult.

mika-la-grand 2019-04-30 16:39

It's a nice game. I thought that the audio was kinda annoying, because it's so high pitch.

markusmo3 2019-04-30 18:46

Fun little game you have there! Its quite innovative in a way that it is unusual for tower defense turrets to despawn after a while. I just wish i knew when that happens. I found myself losing, by my freeze turrents despawning, just when the fast enemies rushed in. A little bar indicating the time on each ball would have been nice. And also a warning for when the fast ones come. Graphics are simple, but have a certain style to them and work good in combination, nice job! Sounds and music are okay-ish, a little too generic in my opinion.

I personally found myself interested in "Game Feel" lately, maybe you want to read up on that. Bigger bullets, more explosions and particles, hit effects, screen shake, etc. Those little things do go a long way for the game to feel satisfying.

gcttirth 2019-04-30 19:51

Thanks for all the feedback everyone!

Feedbacks noted:

1) Give some time to put down orbs. Initially the plan was to make use of the lifespan to use the same orbs for multiple waves, but maybe I can achieve that as well by allowing the player to pause the game to place the orbs?

2) Indicate when the orbs expire. This is something that feels like a must have, yet I missed it because it was "natural" for me :P Noted!

3) Audio. Yeap, definitely my weakest point I would say. Never bothered with music generators or anything but I will learn more about them and hopefully the music and sound effects will be better next time! Audio being high-pitch was def. an issue that even I realized before submitting, but had no idea how to generate other, better audio pieces.

4) Details about the wave. That is also something that was on my "to-do" list, but just didn't make it in time :D Also, the numbers could be tweaked a lot as well. I had plans to display wave information, orb information etc in a way better manner but couldn't find a good UI solution so went with the text lines instead.

5) "Game Feel" - is that the word for what I have been looking for? I feel you on everything you mentioned. I usually considered that as "polish" and is definitely something I plan to improve the most on (along with UI/UX improvements). If anyone has any good resource for these, feel free to notify me!

Again, thanks everyone for the feedback <3

daspanjo 2019-04-30 21:57

Cool game idea and well made. I noticed that the start feels kinda rushed. The first time I started it I was reading the instructions and went gameover. After I knew what to do the game is great. I would suggest to wait with the first enemy until the player placed the first orb. Otherwise it was fun to play!

darkguardsman 2019-04-30 21:59

Was not expecting a tower defense but was enjoyable. As a prototype its good, but for a game it needs more work. As others pointed out it needs a bit more of a delay on start. I would also suggest more of a level layout to give some time. This would also help deal with rushes of enemies coming in right at the decay time of the towers.

jharler 2019-05-01 15:04

I like the look of this game, so good job on the environment. It wasn't immediately obvious what I was supposed to do. I tend to not read instructions before trying a game so I can get an idea of how intuitive things are. Once I figured out what I was supposed to do, it went better. The game is really hard though, so a good challenge. I would recommend making the enemies different from the things that help you (and you yourself). Maybe having them be dark and menacing or something like that (some neat shader effect) would help identify them immediately as a threat.

borys 2019-05-02 19:57

Really cool game, I didn't play many tower defense games, nice getaway. Concept is really interesting for lifetime for turrets and more arcade type of gameplay, It's fun in overall. Good job!

udo 2019-05-07 22:08

Could you make a macOS, Linux, or webGL build? I'd be interested in playing this :smile:

elysiagriffin 2019-05-08 20:05

Thanks for submitting your game for me to play on my livestream!

If you’d like to rewatch the playthrough, you can find it here: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/421751583?t=01h02m35s

Good luck on your ratings, see you next LD! :D

💜 Elysia Griffin AKA Button Feedback Lady

https://www.twitch.tv/elysiagriffin