Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD50 → Tidal Wave
By bjornstahl
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 475 | 3.68 | 21 | |
| Fun | 271 | 3.76 | 21 | |
| Innovation | 20 | 4.30 | 20 | |
| Theme | 372 | 3.92 | 21 | |
| Graphics | 1093 | 3.02 | 21 | |
| Humor | 1073 | 2.14 | 19 | |
| Mood | 1164 | 2.97 | 21 |
This game scratches an itch so, so well. It's a tower defense game, which is a great concept, but it's pacifist, which is an amazing twist. I loved it so much, I could lose hours in this if I'm not careful. Well done! :D
I think this is a terrific idea.
It's quite fresh and seems to have great potential. It needs to find a better way to execute what its triying to do and a substantial amount of improvments in the clarity of gameplay however.
One of the problems is the game fail state is hard to notice. Feels extremely sudden, there should be a larger area of "in between" where you are starting to be overwhelmed and SEE IT CLEARLY (could be done with slopes (if the top of the wall is a rising slope and only full penetration beyond the wall counts as a loss, then you can get A CLEAR VISUAL SENSE of the thing going over the wall, here it seems at some point some ball kinda goes high enough (which is really hard to judge from that far but tbh mostly because you have too much area.things to look at already) and then you lost pretty much immediatly (there is no recourse and you feel like you missed it completly)
Building things seems like a pretty good idea as a core gameplay. But I think what would really make it work is actual ACTIVE ACTION, to waveclear or something along those lines.
Sound. Obviously. I dont mind no graphics, but sound is king.
Anyway its a great idea, you might some low grades in most areas but to me this deserves a good grade on overall, because the idea has potential and its still 'well' executed.
I REALLY wanted to play because this seems like a very cool concept, but nothing happens after you click one of the buildings' button. There are also 2 zip files to download, which are seemingly different versions of the game. This happened on both of them.
I like the cleanliness of your game which fits the theme and works well with the gameplay. If the interface was a little clearer and add audio it would be excellent, but still a great concept!
Cool idea with some nice polish on it! A more fleshed out version of this idea could be really fun. What's here is a bit bare bones (understandable, it's a game jam), but I think what you do have was done with care.
I had exactly the same experience as @leolferraz and did'nt understood how to play. I won't rate the game for the moment because that would not be fair.
If you provide some kind of tutorial or just tell me what are the controls, I'll try again. Don't hesitate to tell me, I would really like to play your game!
Was in the same boat as @leolferraz. Tried both versions, I couldn't figure it out. I click on any of the 3 building buttons at the start and then nothing happens again. I could still move the camera and boulders keep appearing, but that seemed to be it. I tried unplugging my gamepad and that seemed to do the trick? I ended up enjoying this quite a lot. The early game challenge is tough, but the late game need to balance drainage with defense was also very interesting to deal with. I would like the ability to move or destroy outer walls though, as one I had spotted a drainage problem it was impossible to address. Ended up having a lot of fun here and played through quite a few times. Great work!
What an incredible fresh game idea, loved it! The game definitely needs some tutorial, took me a few sessions to understand what's going on. Still couldn't figure out whether population count affects anything except the loosing condition. Nice minimalist visual style, although in my opinion adding some contrast and colors would hugely improve it. Rendering performance definitely needs some improvements, the thing starts dropping FPS pretty quickly, and in the end I was playing at about 10-15 FPS. I'm no Unity expert, but my guess would be that you're drawing all the balls as separate objects which consumes a lot of time. Instancing should make things much faster. Anyways, loved the game, great job!
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This is awesome feedback @gramsinator, especially about the fail state, that is definitely something I will make sure to improve upon after the rating period. Thank you!!
@leolferraz, @chocolat-endive Difficult to say if this is a bug but what it could be is that the buildings on the two leftmost button can only placed inside the walls. I did not have time to make a visual indicator outside of the walls. The 3rd button can only be placed outside of the walls.
If there for some reason is a problem with the buttons you could try to use the 1-3 keys.
Thanks for the feedback @lisyarus. Yes it definitely needs optimization, for a while I was on the fence about going with this idea for the posibility of not having the time to make it even reasonably playable. Thanks for playing it, I will most definitely get some improvements in there.
Cool game reminds me "World War Z"
Fun twist on the usual TD games, I could see myself playing this even after Ludum. Good job!
This is really interesting, a nice tower defense genre spin-off. I like the risk-reward of growing your city and that the boulders try to find a weakspot in your defence. I'm a fan of minimalism but everything grey like this doesn't work too well. Also, the lack of audio is really sad. This was fun, nice job!
Really fun game, I really like this concept! My main issue with it was that when I moved the walls out, some balls warped inside the walls - probably due to their collision not updating fast enough. So the main way I died was because I was trying to increase the wall size. I played about a dozen times to try and get past that initial wall size increase. Once I did, I was able to last for 528 seconds, which felt pretty good - although I died again because I tried to increase the walls a third time. If it weren't for that bug I would probably still be playing instead of typing this up - I don't know why I find it so addicting... :dizzy_face:
This is an incredibly creative concept and a great take on the theme. Some music and sound effects would have gone a long way for the overall feel of the game, so if you expand this further (which you should) definitely implement some. Amazing job!
I think it's an exelent concept! I like that phisical representation of "water" and tidal waves, but i think it's not the best way to do that in future in a big game. Also i have isuess with expanding, when water goes throught the walls no matter what.
Hey, it wasn't that bad. The idea was pretty good, though gameplay felt weird sometimes, especially because I'm not sure if I was doing something wrong but suddenly things disappeared and I didn't know what to do. The game over also appeared a bit out of nowhere, without telling me exactly what had gone wrong or something. Aside from that, graphics are good enough for the game, but some audio would have really upgraded the game. Overall, pretty nice entry, so congratulations!