thoroughlystumped 2022-04-04 23:05
I liked the idea, but I felt I always had too many coins for balancing reasons.
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD50 → Colony Defender
By henrik-ganard, Jonas L, Slothii, Idenn and Willechachanka
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 823 | 3.43 | 42 | |
| Fun | 848 | 3.23 | 42 | |
| Innovation | 769 | 3.23 | 41 | |
| Theme | 784 | 3.57 | 41 | |
| Graphics | 610 | 3.75 | 41 | |
| Audio | 464 | 3.51 | 39 | |
| Humor | 1055 | 2.20 | 31 | |
| Mood | 587 | 3.57 | 37 |
I liked the idea, but I felt I always had too many coins for balancing reasons.
I love the idea. You could improve on feedbacks, it is not always clear where your turrets are. You could write down the exact controls as they may not be obvious to everyone. Great job!
Good take on the tower defense genre. Liked the graphics and camera movement.
Game idea is awesome, but as mentioned above, the balance was off.
Some ideas for improvement: - When all my ships have escaped, take me to the Game Over screen with a report card. Currently, the game just keeps going and that's lame. - The different turrets should look different. I know this is a game jam and all, but at least make them different sizes and colors so I know what I've placed! Also, I had a hard time telling if they were doing more damage or not :/ - Building escape pods manually feels pointless right now, it should just be automated unless something changes in the game's design. Maybe they did cost something to build, but the currency system was so out-of-whack that I never felt poor. - Having an auxiliary competing objective would make this game much richer. Right now it's just "defend defend defend and crank out escape pods." But for the game experience to feel more rich, I need decision to make. The decision could be (e.g.) trying to move the main ship to mine new resources. This would force the player to think about their global turret layout and not just encircle one home base. It may also solve your infinite currency problem :)
Thanks for sharing this, it was quite fun!
That was fun! I got a little confused towards the end because the turrets all looked the same to me so it was hard to know which areas were well protected and which ones weren't. But it was fun balancing between coins and colonists to rescue.
Very cool, the gameplay was simple but worked well.
* I'm not quite sure what triggered the end card? I still had colonists left and my base wasn't destroyed(I don't think). Is there a timer? if so it would help to see that. * There is overlapping text on the "How To Play" screen.
Nice work :)
Really cool graphics and interface, I feel like if the gameplay elements were expanded this could be a neat RTS.
The game is a simple RTS, but it's a well made one, overall. The 3D graphics look nice, and the music during gameplay is appealing. The main menu music being a short loop was slightly annoyed, though. I loved the camera sway when moving the camera around, since it gave the game a much smoother feeling.
Overall, nice job.
neat camera moving effects. wow what an awesome soundtrack! best time I had on Ludum dare so far.
Captura de Tela 2022-04-05 às 05.27.15.png
way too much fun
Cool game. I didn't realized were the colony was at first as the view was outside the asteroid field. And it took me a second to figure out the enemys were also coming from the other side. But Once I figured that out I a lot of fun
@velvetlobster Nice screendump =)
Very cool graphics! I agree with the comments, I really liked the smooth movement of the camera! Heavy music brings a sense of danger, I liked it! The pixel explosion caught my attention!
Graphics were cool, I enjoyed the camera movement and the pacing of the models. I think it took too long for the game to properly ramp up. Also I had hella laser turrets and the fucked shit up. Good submission.
I cant say that the balance is off or not because I placed a lot of towers, destroying everything around the base but then for some reason game over appeared. Same when I was trying to play for the second time.
Anyway, i can imagine myself to immerse into it a bit more. Good game, thanks.
Not much to say that the other comments haven't already, but I really liked the aesthetic you went with, and the camera movement is really great. I felt the game was way too easy, you could definitely make each ship need 5 or more shots to die and I was a little confused about what to do when my human numbers hit 0, and why they went down when I built turrets, but other than that it was a great concept and kept my attention. Good stuff :smile:
I'll echo the same comments as above, prices were too low, nothing happened at the "end", but the rest of the experience is pretty polished and enjoyable. I loved the idea - this could totally be a commercial release with some additional content and fixes. Well done!
Really nice feeling of moving in space! Couldn't stop flying. But the game seems too easy or it becomes harder too slow. I played long enought and created a great number of laser guns. No enemy plane was even close to the base.
I liked the visuals, also the music, being quite simple though, added the atmosphere. The sound of main menu and game sounds are cool too. The amount of text explaining the controls was a bit too much, so finally I ended deploying the same (first type) of currents, nevertheless they managed to destroy all types of enemies from the distance. Did I maybe fell beind your idea?
Beautifully done camera movement. A little more restriction on building would be great. Like making the towers more expensive or not being able to build so far away from the base. It was fun!
This is pretty good. Visually wonderful. Easy to understand but a bit slow paced. The only thing I'm not sure about is what happens once all escape pods have been launched? It just seemed to keep sending ships.
Cool concept. I really like scale of things! But needs balancing work with it being super easy to place a crap ton of guns that shoot everything instantly. I know the conundrum though, there is always something to do and balancing and testing the game is put off til there is no time anymore for it. The end state seems to be also missing when all made it through the portal.
Nice game. Most of my gameplay thoughts have already been adressed, except that I feel there should be a minimum distance between placed turrets. In terms of graphics, I enjoyed the aesthetic, but I would change a few things: - The background is a cubemap, so a seam is visible at the edges. Using a flat image or a skybox will improve the look of your game - The irregularly scaling of some rocks stretches the texture, making it look distorted. Consider using a tileable texture to keep the correct aspect ratio - The rock meshes also had visible squares on the surface. Smooth shading should fix this
All things considered, this is a pretty nice game, and could be really fun with a few balancing and quality of life changes. gj :)
I really enjoyed this. (Execpt waiting for something to happen after alle the colonists left :)). I like the idea of tower defence with moving units you have to defend. I also like the overall aestetics. The small units/big scale strategy vibe is right up my alley. More units, objectives and locations and this could be a game I could play for a long time. Oh, and I also liked the camera panning. It felt very natural and fluid. Thank you guys.
Nice game, feels like an easier version of a lot of tower defence games with an interesting feature that you have to send escape pods. It felt like there were too many coins, I just spammed the whole map with weapons.
Although it got laggy at the end, and I can see why. Guess my strategy isn't the most optimal one. Untitled.png
I like the scale of things and it feels really nice and 3D. Settings menu is appreciated. A little mini map or way to keep track of both your pods and your base would come in handy. Good job, guys, I think it has potential!
I managed to place the whole map with this canons, huh. Anyway, really enjoyed sound design, music and the mood at all.
When got it, acted very fast and furious! Good atmosphere here with a suspense. However, I didn't realize the base was attacked, as I ventured deep into space with saved humans. Thanks for the entry!
Nice little game! Very fitting soundtrack, and even though the controls weren't explained, it was pretty easy to figure out what to do. A little tutorial always helps though!
Amount of coins gets very high very fast so you can place as many turrents as you want very soon
Pretty cool game! It would really be great if game ended when all the pods have escaped. Because I had to wait forever forever for the ending screen, but I finally got it :)
Unbenannt.PNG
This was really cool! The mood of the sci fi tower defence was done super well! I wish the scroll wheel camera movement worked smoother, but I saw other people commend it on here so maybe it was just my browser?
After colonist reached 0 I expected it to end, but I had to wait around. I suggest tightening up the game loop here. And maybe moving the escape point for the pods?
All in all it was a great experience, and a project I am sure you can expand on if you wish! Good job!
Nice entry. The atmosphere/mood was very nice. The soundtrack was exceptional. I'll repeat the same sentiment about balance. It didn't feel challenging. I feel like having the different ship types having different amounts of health would have helped a lot. As it is now, they all die in one hit from the cheap lasers, even the big ones. Speaking of the lasers, I'm not sure why you'd use the rockets. The lasers kill in one and don't have a travel time. But other than that, I really honestly had a great time with the game :)
I enjoyed this game I think team can do big and best projects
Cool visuals, the sound conveys the atmosphere!
I don't think I've ever played a game where I felt so bad for the enemies. They did not stand a chance at all
Clear balancing issues aside, this was very well done in terms of polish and controls. The camera controls were awesome and the UI looked good and worked well. I didn't find any bugs which is a rare feat for a jam game.
The gameplay did suffer I think from the openness of the map. Something about the enemies coming from all directions and spawning from empty space made it hard to come up with some sort of strategy. If placing turrets actually cost a reasonable amount of coins, I feel like the game would be very difficult and unfair. You can't anticipate where the enemies will come from and if you don't have enough coins you can't react to them either. So it would just be a matter of time before an enemy spawns in an area with no turrets.
To counteract this I think you would need at least some kind of mobile turrets, or ships that you could issue orders to. If not attack orders like an RTS, you could just issue move orders. If you make the game based on rounds or waves, you could allow the player to make a few move orders before each wave starts. It would also be good if you included some kind of visual indicator of where ships will appear. Like a wormhole or something
At my first try, the game ended abruptly while there was still escape pods going to the exit, and there was still humans in the main base. Did it end because of a limited time ? Because the main base was destroyed ? I don't know.
At my second try, all the escape pods I sent went through the exit, there was no human in the main base. Only turrets were left. Once again, the game ended abruptly without any reason.
I was imagining these last humans, inevitably lost inside their turrets. I wanted to see them fight to the last of them. Not for surviving, but to make sure the escape pods would leave in safety, and for revenge, and for honor. I wanted to see the main base finally destroyed by all these evil enemy ships. But I had nothing of that. The game just ended and I was disappointed.
You could have displayed some story texts each time an escape pod goes to the exit. For example when you save 60 humans, the text tells : "all the families who have children have been saved". Then, after 200 humans : "all the civilians of the base have been saved". You could also add some ironical text. After the first pod escaped, you could display : "All the richest people of the base are safe, they are happy and they thank you !".
I thought escape pods could be attacked, so I built turrets all along the path to the exit, but it was unnecessary. Escape pods can only be momentarily blocked by enemy ships.
That would have added more depths to the game if escape pods were vulnerable. Then I would have to make more difficult choices : "Do I launch a pod now, as I'm not sure they will survive ? Maybe I should launch it later, but the situation may be worse, or the base may be destroyed."
The attention I had to give to escape pods was quite limited : when the button "escape pod ready" is available, I click on it.
I read the previous comments. People who spammed lots of turrets because they have lots of coins missed the purpose of the game. We have to put as fewer turrets as possible, in order to save as many humans as possible. However, even with this game mechanic, the coins are still earned too fast. Very early in the game, we have so much of them that we don't have to make the choice between turret types. We always choose beefy and expensive tier-2 missiles.
The 3D is beautiful and well done, but is totally not used. The game mechanics just use a 2D board represented in 3D. I put turrets inside rocks, and also turrets colliding other turrets. Maybe these bugs would not have happened in a real 2D board.
Your game is built on an original and frightening idea : the choice of sacrificing humans in turrets, to save other humans. It's really interesting. But I'm sorry to tell you that your game misses lots of opportunity to force us to make difficult choices, and to have emotions and empathy toward those humans to save.