Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD52 → Robert the Druid has Made a Terrible Mistake
By mohamed-dkd and bigpotato
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 98 | 3.97 | 21 | |
| Fun | 186 | 3.73 | 21 | |
| Innovation | 264 | 3.52 | 21 | |
| Theme | 153 | 4.10 | 21 | |
| Graphics | 164 | 4.15 | 21 | |
| Audio | 52 | 4.05 | 21 | |
| Humor | 149 | 3.55 | 21 | |
| Mood | 104 | 4.00 | 20 |
Absolutely adored the art and the music. The ending was hilarious, it was my favourite part! Although I had already bought all of the best trees by wave 6/10, so I wish there was maybe a 3rd type of tree to keep me engaged and playing instead of waiting to win.
Cool game. The harvesting of the trees for saplings provides a nice risk-reward choice early on. However, after I filled every spot with one of the advanced tree, what do I do? I just watch them demolish every wave coming in. Even the final boss does not offer any interaction.
Good music, and a good little tower defence mechanic with the tradeoff of gambling on removing turrets in order to add more. It got really easy - feels like it needs more tree types, more enemy variety, and more levels. But the basics are good!
Great entry, really like the harvest aspect added on top of tower-defense. The game froze up on the last heart, and I don't think the 2nd tree gives 4 when at stage 2. Would be cool to see it evolve more. :)
Probably the most fun game I've played this LD so far. I'm a sucker for TD games and this one works very well for such a short experience.
I really liked the concept of towers as trees that grow, and then harvesting the grown trees for resources to build more towers. I haven't seen that before, and it adds a really nice element of risk/reward in the early game. Very, very fun. Would love to see this concept with more towers, maps, and enemies! :)
The atmosphere is very nice, too. Good graphics and audio!
@tigpan Thanks for the feedback. Me and bigpotato wanted the game to be as funny as possible, and hence the perfect ending XD. As for waves 7-9, I debated whether the game was too long for only 2 towers, but decided to keep it as is, because we didn't have enough time to do further balancing
@maartene Glad you liked the beginning. We had hard time balancing the end, especially making the game suitable for both TD veterans and beginners. I agree that stages 7-10 are super easy and kinda "just watch it until the end" once everything is maxed. I am planning to balance it further and add more trees after the jam
@adam-burt Glad you liked it. The game definitely needs more enemies and trees, but that was all we managed to accomplish within the jam. However, we are definitely going to improve this further
@joey-shipley I am happy that you liked our core mechanic. The crashing in the html5 last heart was a bug that we didn't notice until last minutes, because it is working as intended in the exe, so we missed noticing it.
@jeffsobel Thanks for such a nice feedback ^__^. We definitely had plans for more towers and enemies, but the jam time limit said "No!". However, we definitely want to continue this project and improve it further
Fun little tower defense game with a unique mechanic! I really like the risk/reward associated with having to destroy your defenses to create better ones. The graphics and music were simple, but they did the job well.
A few gripes: - When I first started, I didn't realize that the tree-planting took time, so I thought that the controls were just really unresponsive. Maybe add more distinct sound effects and animations to indicate that the player character is currently performing a task. - I never figured out the difference between the two tree types. I figured the pine trees were stronger since they cost more, so I built more of those. - For the final boss, you don't do much except sit there crossing your fingers that the damage is pouring into him fast enough. You can't build new towers, because that would require demolishing an existing tower just to create a weaker one.
Other than that, I enjoyed. Nice work!
Daaaamn loved this game. Graphics and colour palette were great. Wonderful animations (especially at the end). Music was amazing... great tunes, really made the mood, and changed with the game perfectly. Did you write it for this jam? SFX were good and well done though competed with the music sometimes. Maybe EQ them differently? I dunno.
Gameplay wise it was really fun at the start when it was more challenging, but as other people have said, after a few rounds when you've established a bunch of trees (especially the powerful ones) it's impossible to lose, and nothing to do other than sit there and watch. Which really, at the end, was still fun. But before then, there wasn't much variety. Maybe there could be? Like have another couple of enemy types that get introduced gradually.
Gameplay wise... maybe make the better trees more expensive (like way more, 4 or 5). Have some way that trees die or something. Basically just some reason to stay interactive over the whole time.
Ending was hilarious, kudos.
@mohamed-dkd I hope you keep improving this game. Great basis for a tower defense game.
Excellent entry, A+ for art and story, loved the ending! Some visual bugs with the boss health bar being a) too big for the window and b) going on top of some UI elements but under others. As others have noted, the economy could use some tweaking (and/or extra mechanics added, maybe you have to water or fertilise the trees to keep them shooting?), currently maxing out all trees leaves you with nothing to do for the latter part of the game. But a nice tower defense game and a nice take on the theme. Well done!
Very cool game, but I found it a bit hard! Trees are missing their targets a lot, and you are almost guaranteed to be 50+% dead after a couple waves, and only then can you start to stabilize. Afterwards, on the other hand, I imagine the exponential growth of resources would become imba, so there should be some other mechanic to balance these two aspects out (helping in the beginning, hindering on later levels).
Very crisp and consistent art style, I liked the subtle burning of the city too. All in all a very fun and polished title, well done!
Great game! It looks awesome, and the music is excellent, you can feel the tension growing! It wasn't obvious to me at the start that you could cut your trees to grow more, but once I did understand, I won easily, but in a very satisfactory way. Great job! :)
@zungryware thanks for the detailed feedback. I really appreciate it. I am also glad you liked the game. For the animation, we thought that the Druid animation was sufficient, but it is true that it can be misleading at first. Pines have "homing: bullets that never miss and they shoot faster. Also, definitely the ending can be boring if you have pines in all the spots (that's my mistake for not having enough time to balance the end game)
@benk Really glad you liked the game.
The music was done by our team member Backo, but he just used tracks that he already wrote (he sometimes write music during the jam, but not this time).
I tried doing some minor EQ to lower SFX volume, but it seems it wasn't the correct level yet.
The tips are very good. I will definitely use these improvements to better the game in the future.
Glad you liked the ending, we worked so hard to make it soo silly yet serious XD.
Do you know what? I eye rolled when I saw it was a tower defence game, but the harvest mechanic made the game worth a full play through. It added a nice twist on an otherwise stale genre. Good work for that. Graphics and audio are great and coherent. I thought I was going to hate it, but I really liked it. So top marks for that.
Good stuff :8ball:
Really good premise. As others said once you have a good setup there is nothing to do, but as concept I really like the mechanics.
I can't really add anything which the others haven't mentioned. Nice game, keep at it!
@maartene thanks. We are definitely planning to improve it further
@khadia Glad you liked it.
Definitely the end game needs tweaking as everyone said XD. I tried to make the end game harder, but it seems I underestimated how fast it is to get maximum firepower. As for the GUI issue, I will fix it as soon as I improve the other aspects of the game.
@fluburbio Glad you loved the game.
The game definitely needs a tutorial or introductory level as many parts of the mechanics are left to the user to discover. Having a tutorial level was part of the original game idea, but the game jam time limit said "NO!" XD XD
@oddballdave Happy to have changed your mind XD. It is definitely a weird experience playing a jam entry in a genre you dislike.
Both our artist and musician did an awesome job in this jam. Made me feel that my job was to make sure everyone experience this amazing art without many bugs XD. Hopefully I succeeded
That was awesome! Great work! :D
Loved the game. This Robert fellow is quite the character. He "accidentally" opened a portal to the dark world, and his brilliant solution is to use trees????? 1000IQ strats.
Okay but the game was good, took me a couple of deaths to get the hang of it, but after grasping those first few minutes it was a breeze. Great music and lovely art, can't wait to see what you guys do with this.
@rentem @samuli , Happy that you liked the game, and I will for sure improve it further
@wobbleblocks Thanks ^__^
@kelvin-mulungu Robert is a Druid, so plants are more or else his field of expertise XD (It is still unknown what sort of experiments he was trying to do in his house when he made the accident)
Indeed, the game has very hard start, but a very easy finish. Which is something that needs to be fixed to have a more balanced gameplay, which is our next main aim