insulin 2019-04-30 01:36
An interesting concept, after finally figuring out how to play it, i quite enjoyed it
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD44 → Force of Nature
By griddolini, Golden and Bakenshake
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 157 | 3.84 | 74 | |
| Fun | 332 | 3.52 | 75 | |
| Innovation | 216 | 3.53 | 74 | |
| Theme | 81 | 4.01 | 75 | |
| Graphics | 169 | 4.16 | 76 | |
| Audio | 97 | 3.90 | 72 | |
| Mood | 224 | 3.71 | 71 |
An interesting concept, after finally figuring out how to play it, i quite enjoyed it
Nice looking and a great fit for the theme! Gets a bit hard after the first few waves, but pretty enjoyable still.
I couldn’t figure out how to move, RMB did nothing, I was able to plant a bunch of stuff and attack in place but nothing else. I really liked the artwork and music though :)
@snowinn RMB being Right Mouse Button did nothing? Sorry to hear that and thanks for the feedback! Can you tell me what platform you were on?
One of the best LD44 games I've played so far! I really enjoyed just above every aspect of this game. The only thing I would have liked to see improved would be having more control over what buildings were being generated/upgraded.
Thanks for rating our game!
Took a little bit to get started but it was fun. Combat is a little clunky/unreliable but overall the experience is fun. Nice work!
Fun game. The art is great and glad to see more people using Godot!
Lots of people using Godot in this jam ... combat was a bit unreliable but I got the idea and in overall it was pretty fun
Very polished for a jam game! Mechanics are not too new but solid.
@bakenshake ohhh I thought it was the keys r, m, and b, to move the tree and I was very confused. I like the game even more now, despite certain parts still being confusing :)
Very cool! You managed to pack a lot in here. The sound and music are particularly impressive!
I also liked that the mobs weren't particularly dangerous to you, but were very dangerous to your town.
The controls were awkward, though. Maybe something like WASD to move and leftmouse/middlemouse/rightmouse (and keyboard alternatives) to use abilities might have felt better.
Insanely good game.
ENTS! Super pumped about this game because I was just thinking about Ents the other day. This was AWESOME.
I'm in love with the title screen. \* - \*
It's got some of the best presentation I've seen from LD, but balance wise, it is completely broken. Since upgrading a building to max will probably net you a health max increase, there's no reason not to do it since the upgrade will probably give you back the health you spent on it! You recover HP faster than enemies can take it away unless there's lots of them, I found myself never using the tree ability and mostly the sweep, rare the stomp. And there's a bug where if you die, go to the menu and start again, it keeps your progress.
But I absolutely love the art! It's sooooooo colourful and the sound is also nice!
Nice game, the art is really nice. I especially like the swipe marks left over from the Q ability. Good job!
really nice game. i love the art. :heart: good job!
Quite good game I realy liked it.
But:
1)Mabye it would be better that if the attack could be "automatic" (without need to click with left mouse button) and by it selfe ite attack is quite slow.
2)Also even thou I read the instruction and intro I didn´t quite remember all the stuff. Probably it would be good to have eather button or key to look on the instruction during the gameplay.
But if there is something that I need to shacke your hands for is the addition of sound witch many games here lacks.
The art style of this game is just great
I really enjoyed playing that game, and I feel it has a lot of potential. The artwork is pretty good as well. A few things that could be improved if you want to continued developping it (which I think you should do because it's great): Try implementing a interface for the upgrades because I feel it lacks a bit of instructions and explanations for what they do. The attack mechanic is great but I don't know why you put 2 close range attacks, maybe one close range (the scratch attack) and a long range attack but with smaller radius (like throwing a branch or something like that). Also it could really use a map or an indicator to show where the ennemies are coming from, I sometimes had trouble understand where they were ! Anyway, this is a really good game for a LD. Great job !
Wow this is really beautiful, very nice sounds as well
Nice game but took some time for me to understand how to play. After that I have enjoyed playing. Graphics is cool and I like how it fits the theme.
@entropy Thank you!! Not sure how the others feel, but I would like to continue developing it. Yesterday I had thought a ranged attack (exactly throwing a branch or tree trunks) would have been awesome. Had not considered the mini map, but that makes sense. It could be super simple too. Gray box with red dots in top right corner to start. Perhaps a hover or click the icons can give more explanation as to what they do and their dmg/range. I have a lot of ideas to add to this, but who knows what will happen. Thank you for your feedback! I'm so glad you enjoyed it.
The game was nicely made but one thing that struck out to me was that the slash move was waaay too overpowered compared to the other abilities. The collision with the small minions also got a bit on my nerves as sometimes I couldn't see what I was stuck behind. Overall the game would be a start to something great tho :D
I liked the art style, and the game is fun. Music a bit too loud, but it's a nice soundtrack. A couple of critics I could give is that you could add some particle effects over the flowers, since it's hard to tell them apart from the rest of the background. some bigger tooltips would be nice too, to remember what each building did.
I liked idea, art and music! But gameplay is too difficult for me. After some time I can't kill all enemies and when I am busy with one, others are destroying my forest :( Nice game and protector looks very good!
Cool stuff. Liked the art, I am a big fan of pixel. Had trouble finding enemies just a thought if your planning on rebalancing. Great work!
I wasn't able to make the forest energy % go up and a wave never started. I tried planting trees everywhere, including on top of the saplings that randomly appeared (but I don't know if that was the right thing). Some tutorial-like cues in the beginning would go a long way on getting the player up to speed.
I love the background music for the title screen! I wish it continued to play on the controls screen and the story screen.
EDIT: I saw your note in the description to press spacebar by a sapling and was able to play. It felt like the framerate was a little low.
@tinymushroom Yes, I totally agree! More tool tips in-game and maybe an example wave. The saplings are the small looks trees with red or yellow leaves. A wave won't start until you build your first building.
Thank you about the music! I had wanted it to continue playing on other screens as well but alas time.
Aha! Took me a bit to figure it out! I think my one piece of feedback there would be to make the saplings visually stand out a bit more, to signal their significance. That being said though, it looks great and the attention to detail is nice. I'm not familiar with Godot so I don't know if it does this for you but it seemed like you had sound localization working to give you a good idea of where the enemies were in relation to you! Oh, and very nice music as well!
I like this! It's like a mashup of a tower defense and a MOBA. I did have some trouble getting started though; I couldn't figure out how to build stuff at first. And later, I kept missing the flowers where you could build. They were hard to see and disappeared quickly. I think you've got a good core here though, with definite room for expansion.
I do wish that you could move while aiming, or that your attacks would just occur in the direction of your cursor when they were chosen. I can see that you're mimicking MOBA controls, but unless you're able to design it to solely use the mouse, WASD/joystick movement would also be nice.
Overall, very good job.
Man, if my team told me to make a MOBA LD game, i'd tell them to take a hike. If they told me to make a city-building game, I'd laugh in their faces. The fact that you pulled off a MOBA-city-building HYBRID game in 72 hours is AMAZING. Great job.
My favorite part was watching the little dudes fly. Oh, and being a huge dude stomping around. Thanks for the experience!
I think the game is not MOBA(Multiplayer Online Battle Arena) style, but in the style of TD (Tower defence) Anyway, to make this game for 2 days - it's cool!
One of the best jam entries. Graphics are great, music is great. The only thing I've had issues with is onboarding. I couldn't get what I need to do for quite a while. Once I did, I found a very nice game. Although a bit hard for me.
What I couldn't understand is when do the saplings appear? can I place them or I can just build them when they randomly appear. Because if that's just RNG, I've had a bad luck. All my farms appeared in one bunch and all protecting towers on completely other useless spot :/
But I really liked this one :smile: Keep up the good work.
awesome game, i would just improve somee of the mechanics, stacking multiple trees on the same stop should'n t be allowed it's just "weird" and just by forcing the user to find a free spot would develop differente user dynamics and behaviours, also, since the treeant collides with the sappliings, the user would bee forced to strategicaly place the tree saplings to avoid blocking his path and bmaybe force the AI driveen enemies deviates from the sapplings and gains time with them havaing to calculate large trajectories... the stomp skill is a bit nerfed compared to the slash , i would just use slash for everything, i think that stomp could be something more like a "AOE" spell around the treeant while slash just knock back and spread the units aways.
Also, i missed the ability to just "trample" the smallest enemies, i would love to run above them !!!
The shadows are a bit glitch, at first i tought that was kinda "Fog Of War HUD", but the shadows gave a good clue about where the enemies are comming and used that as an "enemy compass" and i would just put the braziers just a bit far from each other to avoid multiple shadows comming from the same units;
Missed some ambience effects, like wind, tree leaves shaking, birds, grass hoopers, cicadas and etc ...
Some Sfx that could have increased the weight of the treeant, like huge ground stomps followed by leaves shaking, and some wood creaking and squeaking, branchs breaking and hitting each other...
The art looks very nice. I can move by clicking the right mouse button and plant trees and do the attacks with the buttons. Planting trees decreases the health, but the health regenerates. How do I harness the energy of the forrest? I tried the attacks on the trees (existing and placed) and on the purple animal, but the meter stayed at 0%.
@mika-la-grand You earn forest energy by having more saplings turned into buildings. Enemies won't start spawning until you build your first structure. Refer to the How to Play screenshot above! Hope this helps, and sorry for the confusion. :(
This was great, i loved the mechanic of using your health, and the theme of being a huge treant guardian of the grove! Stomping on little goblins was so satisfying and watching them chop down my trees filled me with wrath!!
I agree with a lot of the other reviewers that things could've been made a bit clearer to the player somehow. I only briefly scanned the instructions screen (as most players will) so it took me a while to figure some things out. Is RMB to move mentioned somewhere? If so I never noticed it. What is the purpose of planting trees, to obstruct the enemies?
Great entry overall.
Slow paced but a very calm and relaxing game, I will say that it's a little annoying when the samplings just disappear but overall, great job ^-^
The most realistic Treebeard simulator out there! ;)
I died, but when I restarted, the percentage left off where I died so I beat it! Overall I liked growing the different buildings, though at first I thought I would be able to place it versus checking to see if any plants have grown (maybe you have to plant the seeds or something to let the player know where the plants are?). The towers didn't seem to do too much even after I upgraded, it seems more effective to just attack the soldiers directly, so maybe there can be some balancing there? Overall though I liked it. Keep up the good work!
Nice job!
Nice game, it takes a little time to adapt to the speed and mechanics of the creature, but once you got it right you feel pretty powerful 💪
I kept it in my downloads to try to finish later on 🙂 Good job!
I love this! Gameplay-wise it's similar but even more polished than our entry. Looks like we both had similar game ideas for the theme. Well done!
Well done! amazing entry and quite polished, the things that I could say about what deserve some improvement I'm sure that you guys already know, after all 3 days to make a game isn't nearly enough time, and you guys did an impressive job! One of the best entries that I've played so far this ld
Excellent RTS sorta stuff, I don't get to play enough of this type of game. Really well done. Pretty lookin main character tree too. I never fully understood how Farms worked -- did they restore your health only once? Is it worth it to upgrade them? Who can truly understand the mystery of the forest. Great work, fun fun game.
Congratulations on your first Ludum Dare! I think you already know by now what areas you succeeded in and which areas you might want to improve on for next time. Personally, I really liked the music and visual design, though I had a hard time differentiating the small, red saplings that came in groups of three that were essential to progress in the game with the small, red flowers that came in groups of three that were just set dressing - just turn them into violets and your game is much more readable. I also think the game needs to be a bit tougher, as I could just run around the map, not attacking any villagers, and just spam Space until I found a sapling. Maybe making the villagers destroy your buildings and revert your progress would encourage more active participation in the game?
Great artwork, good sound effects, and it's generally a very difficult genre of game to implement on such a short timescale. It's not 100% an RTS game but it's in that area, and getting all the graphics and collisions working well in that 3D-2D environment can't have been easy. The game really made a sort of a "life economy" work so in that regard it fit the theme much better than most. There were only 3 types of enemies I think but it wasn't a problem, the waves were appropriate in difficulty and they had great AI making them interesting to fight.
My main issue was how slowly the forest energy meter built and how cryptic it was. I built buildings whenever I saw the flowers (often couldn't find them when I wanted them) and I got to like 49% but had a hard time getting any further. One other thing is the escape key - in RTS games the escape key is deselect, for undoing a q/w/e's transition to casting mode putting you back to the default mode. It should follow convention here too.
@niterich Thanks for the feedback! We changed our tileset partway through but didn't update the building and sapling assets in time. Enemies do destroy buildings, but at earlier waves they are pretty weak.
GREAT job on making the enemies fly around like that on impact. The best part of this game for me was to swipe and keep comboing them in the air for a bit. It really gave the sense you were a huge treant and just batting these armies around. This game is just packed and I'm impressed with how much you fit into this game. Most importantly you really hit the theme on its head. The life currency isn't just a tacked on mechanic, it's very ingrained into the lore of the treant/forest so it makes total sense.
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/421751050?t=02h35m07s
Good luck on your ratings, see you next LD! :D
💜 Elysia Griffin AKA Button Feedback Lady
https://www.twitch.tv/elysiagriffin
Very good! Great entry. The gameplay complexity suprised me ne feature at a time. I think this game is the first one with a really satisfying combat system. It was a blast to hit and kick the little soldier guys with my big stump man. Awesome! The art and sound was amatzing as well and fit the mood perfectly. I'm not the biggest fan of standard wave based tower defense games so I was delighted that the the player could actively participate in the combat moba-style. An awesome mix of genres that I really enjoyed.
The only criticism I have is, that game felt a little slow at times, but that can be excused due to the fact, that the player is a big tree. Also, the difficulty ramp was very steep, at least for me. It got merciless starting by wave 5. No chance to survive for me :) Still got a lot of out of the round! Thanks for making this!
Very good crunch and feel to the attacks of the treant! Seeing the guys flying was very satisfying. What I could build where was very vague, I just stomped about and randomly created stuff. But that did not distract much from the stompgin - nicely done!
Neat idea! This is a pretty cool looking game, lots of flavor here!
Seems a bit arbitrary to use a MOBA control scheme for what to my is begging to be an action game, but that might just be my own personal biases talking. :P
It does seem to be a tad slow, though. I feel like I experienced everything the game had to offer in the first few minutes, and then the rest felt like a bit of a grind of doing the same things over and over until I unfortunately died. :\
There seems to be quite a bit of potential here, though. Y'all were able to pump out something quite cool in a weekend! :)
A lovely entry, I particularly enjoyed the music (especially the main menu track is really nice). The visuals are a bit disjointed, particularly the 2D shadows and the fire seem out of place. Though some stuff looks neat - the main character and the attack animations are nice and juicy. The gameplay is cool, especially the the swipe attack feels really nice as you sent the buggers flying away (the big ones should probably be just pushed IMO). The controls took some getting used and I'd have preffered WASD movement with key-bound abilities and aim cursor. The are visualisation boxes are cool and all, but it felt slighly wonky. I don't really like mouse-driven movement, though so it might be just me.
Overall it's a really solid entry. I got to wave 7 (around 40-45% of the forest energy level). I'd could easily imagine playing more of it if there were more abilities/buildings and enemeies and if the control scheme was revamped.