Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD51 → Gold Collex Hex Defense
By solrun
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 22 | |||
| Fun | 22 | |||
| Innovation | 22 | |||
| Theme | 23 | |||
| Humor | 21 | |||
| Mood | 21 |
I don't think I understand what to do. I can place towers, and drop a gold pile, but I can't drag gold onto the towers. It also looks like it's running at a very low frame rate in Edge on my machine (9fps), so maybe the low performance is breaking mouse drag?
@juxipolo You drag gold onto towers to build them. So if it isn't doing anything, it's probably already built. I apologize that it isn't very clear.
I released a new build with some tutorial text on the side. It also kinda fixed the fps. Instead of starting with a large grid of hexes, they pop in over time so you can start at high fps and watch it go down over time. I think I'm just looping over large amounts of things every frame and I could probably optimize that.
Hey I like this game and I played through the entirety of it. It was pretty fun, but took me a while to get. If you make the enemies actually hurt the player and improve a few things here and there this could be a fun game to play!
Amazing game. Really catchy graphics. Some work can be done from the gameplay side and can be a made a bit more complex. I think the 10 second rule did redistricted a lot of possibilities. You should try to remove the ten second rule and add a little more complex mechanic in the game, that is if you planning it to take further. Overall good job and all the best. Please do check out my submission as well.
bevy_github_ci_template_OyRkUsxn4x.png It took me a long time to understand how to play. But at the end, I won. It took me longer than I expected. Good job
This is a simple but a good game, well done !!!
I liked it :) it wasn't working on firefox tho, just fyi
Cool idea and a nice execution. Great job!
(in a rush to test many, please do not mind the cursory review)
1. big coincidence, I discovered and dabbled in Bevy earlier this year; still in the process of learning it! (on hold) The demonstration games seemed laggy, but I wonder if this is a hardware-related issue 2. there is a desktop version on itch.io; you should add a link from the Ludum Dare page, to highlight it :) 3. judging by the game descriptions (both pages) and LePoulet’s capture, there is quite some text to swallow to get the rules! Which is understandable, when you want to make things clear, but it is less hard for the player when you manage to get an in-game tutorial (and the best tutorials are implicit ones!). Still, great that you can read it back with the press of a key :) 4. X: layout-independent! :) 5. ‘gold pile’ concept to store gold reminds me of *Dungeon Keeper* :) And the red demon’s face has me thinking of its Bile Demons! 6. gold following mouse = original and funny clever concept! (already spotted in description) 7. the red squares are apparently ‘enemies’, or at least ‘mining targets’; this was not obvious! 8. boss appears: but why? After some time? 9. no sound? 10. reading the indications took me more time than to play in practice! 11. sometimes, moving the mouse too quickly too far makes the coins lose focus; is this on purpose, so that we have to be careful? 12. on victory: first missed the "You Win" button! Is "Continue" for just playing around with the coins? 13. about 20 FPS towards the end; actually, FPS dropped from about the appearance of the red squares. Watching a bit more: the **massive** amount of coins make it drop to 17 FPS. Yet, the very beginning was smooth, so I think Bevy may work smoothly on my hardware, things just get nasty at some point when there are too many elements 14. having some threat would enhance the tension and interest of the game! For example, once the boss has appeared, let him damage the towers in some way 15. I realize that apart from testing X at my first run (and thus getting stuck at the very beginning XD), I **never** used G (and X anymore)! :o Does making gold piles have any interest for the player? Because otherwise, you can just keep the coins floating around the mouse, apparently 16. launching again just to try a bit the gold pile mechanic. Ah yes, and also destroying a tower 17. I forgot to say I think the wall/brick towers look cute, with their roundness :) 18. just understood now: coherently with the indications, coins are *only mined*, and thus, the red squares are actually *thiefs*! (rather than minables) And so, the gold piles enable you to protect gold from them. (not needed in my ‘true’ run) And you need to avoid them with the mouse -> dexterity aspect
**Takeaway:** an original concept! :) It feels prototypical in that there is no sound and only the very core mechanics, but I like how you managed to combine both mouse dexterity with management (in some ‘tower defence’-oriented way). The fact that the map appears progressively is also charming and makes me think (in addition to the boss’s appearance) of fog of war, which could perhaps be used in an extension of the game. Some conflicting mechanic(s) would add to the challenge, as winning for the moment is rather easy (I built the towers as just neihbouring enough, so I did not even realize the squares were a danger in the first place! Glad I tried the game again to test the gold piles!!). I like the tiles and towers’ graphics; the squares could be made into something which makes more sense in the context (say, little red winged flying demons, in a Firebrand fashion! :)), and the boss is charming programmer art (fine with me!). :) Sounds would definitely add life *and* help getting the action. As for the theme, I think having regular generation/mining is classic and that it is not much of a twist — contrary to the mouse-following idea, which is a great one. :)
In my eyes, a charming prototype that could definitely go somewhere. :) Keep on experimenting with Bevy on it; two birds with one stone!
By the way, quick advice just in case, as people are sometimes not aware of it and ‘karma’ here is 0 (maybe you already know, since this is not your first game here, but I would rather not take the chance): reviewing other games will help you get testers and feedback. Because of the new system (which date I do not know…), your game was among the first ones in ‘Classic’ ordering, but not in the ‘Smart’ one, which is the default. :/ **Edit:** actually, it was in Smart that I found it, my bad!! But the advice still holds. ;)
Also wanted to say that seeing the thumbnail/cover again, I noticed a fireball! Was this the intended image for the squares? Or maybe an attack for the boss? :)
The game doesn't seem to work - I cannot drag gold onto towers. Maybe this is an issue with the web build?
@booremi Thanks! Taking a while to get it seems like a common issue. I didn't do a great job of making things intuitive. The enemies can hurt you by grabbing your gold and running away, but it doesn't really hurt you that badly. I thought about making a lose condition if they stole enough gold, but never got around to it. I've found it's easy to make your game not frustrating if you just don't let players lose (and less effort for me).
@baylock I wouldn't've called my graphics catchy, but at least they seem more serviceable than I thought. I like the 10s rule to spawn gold around towers every 10s. I do want to add some more complexity, but ran out of time. I might keep working on this game though. I'll be sure to check out your game. At least playing the games of people who comment on my game is the rule I usually go by in game jams.
@lepoulet The game isn't super intuitive to figure out how to play; sorry about that. The boss maybe has too much health, but I wanted to have it have high health so the player will try to build more towers to build up their economy by investing gold into new towers to produce more gold. And to get in a sort of flow state of just generating as much gold as fast as possible. The game is largely an idle game like a clicker game more than a real strategy game. So I kinda needed the boss to have high health to help players get to that experience.
@cslupius It works for me on Firefox so I don't know what to tell you. I'm using Firefox on windows. Maybe it doesn't work on mac or Linux? And it is weird that Firefox has slightly lower performance. I start at 60fps on chrome, but 57-58fps on Firefox.
@mossieur-patate 1. I've been liking Bevy so far. Although I am so much slower at using it as compared to Unity. If I had made this game in Unity, I probably would have got twice as much done. But I have almost 10 years of Unity experience. 2. I guess I can link to the windows build. I just figured people would play online if given the option. 3. Agreed. I was struggling trying to figure out how to fit a tutorial in and putting text was quicker. 8. Boss appears when you build 10 towers. 9. No sound. 10. Ya, I could probably make the tutorial less wordy. Good tutorials take too much time to make. I should really practice them so I can make them quickly in a game jam. 11. The leash range on dragging gold is intended. If your mouse gets too far away, the gold stops following. 12. I made the victory screen so you knew it was over and nothing new would happen, but you could continue if you wanted to see how many towers or how big of a pile of gold you could make. It's also easier than figuring out what to do at the end like roll credits or whatever. 13. There are a ton of entities in this game. And it is very poorly optimized because I don't really know how to work with Bevy yet. Each gold is checking the distance to every other gold so they can push each other away and fill space. So that is O(n*n). Each enemy is checking each gold to find the closest to try to pick up. So that is O(n*n) too. Your mouse is checking every tile each frame to figure out which one it's touching every frame. Just loads of looping through every entity every frame because I'm using Bevy wrong. It's kind of a showcase of how powerful an entity component system can be even when you code it very poorly. 14. Agreed. The enemies are only really a problem for the first 30s of the game and then after that you can largely ignore them. 15. X and G are pretty useless. I originally had the idea that the map would be much larger and spaced out. So you'd want to grab gold from the spaced out towers and bring it to a central location (a gold pile) for storage and then use it later. But you can just build new towers and store gold in them by paying for them bit by bit over time. The gold piles can cut down on lag I guess. 18. That is the intention, but I didn't execute it super well.
This is very much a prototype. My main idea for this game was a tower defense game with an emphasis on the economy aspect - how you get gold to make towers. Usually you just kill enemies and they drop gold and then you spend it on new towers. So I made the towers produce gold and you have to use your mouse to deliver it. And by having gold produced on the open land around towers, it challenges the conventional wisdom of tower defense games to stack all your towers together. The expanding map was actually a gamechanger in a way I wasn't really expecting. It used to just spawn at full size at the beginning. So you could just place all of your towers in optimal places from the get-go. With it growing over time, you have less space so you can't always place towers with 6 empty tiles around them to maximize production. Which was more interesting. Plus the growth looks cool. Sounds - I'm not great at sounds and I was kinda worried that they would get very repetitive. If I had something for gold spawning it might get really annoying when you have a bunch of towers spawning gold. So I didn't bother with sounds.
Thanks for all the feedback!
@mossieur-patate I am aware I should give feedback on other peoples' games. I took like a week to figure out how to make a web build with Bevy so I just recently published this game so I just haven't gotten around to it yet.
The fireballs are what your towers shoot at the enemies. They are pretty low contrast so they are hard to see if you're not looking for them. (which is also fine if you don't notice them because they don't actually rotate to face where they're moving so they travel backwards sometimes)
@congusbongus You left click to place an unbuilt tower, then drag gold onto it to pay for it and build it. Then once it's built, you can't drag more gold onto it. Drag gold by just moving your mouse, you don't need to press any buttons.
The unbuild towers have a health bar below them showing how much gold you have drug onto them. Once it's full, the health bar goes away. So it there is no health bar, that's a fully-grown tower and you don't need to feed it anymore.
drag.gif @solrun it still doesn't seem to work for me, see screen recording. Are the small maroon squares the gold? They are not following the mouse. Also I've noticed that I have to use shift+X / shift+G to delete/build gold; X/G alone does nothing I'm using mac
@congusbongus Took me a while to get it also, but you need to delete the gold pile that spawns at the start of the game, and it will explode into little yellow circles of gold - they follow the mouse, and can be dragged onto towers to build them.
Once I worked that out, the game was actually really fun. Very much got the feeling of a prototype, but I think there's a solid gameplay loop hiding within that. And I'm a sucker for just seeing resource production go up and up. Oh, and you might want to make it clearer in the game that the boss is killed by feeding it gold - I was just building up my defences for ages waiting for it to attack before I went to check the itch.io description 😅
@congusbongus Red squares are enemies. They come in to steal your gold. Orange squares are gold piles. They just store gold. glenugie is right. In the screenshot at the top of this page, you can see a bunch of gold, 2 towers that have been built and one tower that hasn't been built yet (the short one to the left with a red progress bar (I should have made the progress bars gold instead of red because they measure gold, not health)). That's weird that you need to use shift on a mac.
@glenugie My main goal with this game was to just produce as much gold as possible and then just build more towers to make more gold just for the sake of it. The boss should be clearer. I guess I forgot it's only explained in the itch description.
Graphics are minimalistic, cool game mechanics
Thanks to @glenugie for explaining what I had to do. Once I figured it out, it was really fun, but getting started without any help is impossible. If you wanna keep working on this game, please put some work into an actual tutorial. The gold-dragging mechanic felt great and having the enemies just take away gold made it much more relaxed. I noticed that I was able to build towers on top of other towers, just wanted to let you know in case you didn't notice yet :)
Cool little tower thing. Like others, I found the initial stage of the game quite confusing. For some reason, if I put down a tower preview before breaking the gold storage, it wouldn't spawn the gold. Once I got going, putting stuff down felt quite good with the gold dragging around.