PRECIOUS CARGO (and some aliens trying to steal it from you)

ugly-robot 2023-05-01 01:37

I loved this! Innovative idea, adorable little pixel art - and surprisingly deep interplay between the aliens attacking the truck, or attacking my defenses.

Also - the fact you were able to add little flora and fauna to flesh out the world - so fun! Nothing beats little retro dudes crawling around the screen!

Other things I enjoyed: * Transitions, animations, and UI were all very polished * The silly level titles :D * Felt well balanced - an almost impossible feat for a game jam - though I was unable to get to the later unlocks

All that polish, in compo, with no engine - insane. I almost don't even want to comment on that, lol. You mad lad. Excellently done! You should be very proud

Also - love your vids! Very happy to see you checked out ldjam. Hope it was fun!

remus 2023-05-01 09:57

Nice one! This is really impressive with no engine! Nice sfx and graphics are cute, I love the truck's smoke. :D I like the twist on tower defense. Polished and very-very good overall.

chuckiee 2023-05-01 09:58

TD for this one is really good fit. Impressive amount of polish & levels, too bad I kinda suck at it :D

daandruff 2023-05-01 10:02

Really nice looking game. I loved the art style. I'm not that big on tower defense games but it seems like a nice one. The thing is that I could just play through the first 10 levels without upgrading anything and just using the first basic structure. So the depth wasn't really needed. Anyways... fun game :D Looks really cool!

emily-ttg 2023-05-01 10:23

Fancy seeing you here ;p - really fun though I will say it was a little hard to tell what was going on at times with the res. being so low. Looks great and plays great, and emscripten+web graphics actually working in a homebrew'd engine sounds like it was a nightmare to get running ;F

jdah 2023-05-01 10:54

@daandruff early balancing tests showed that the MK. 1 turret block strategy was near unbeatable (until level 6). I tried to balance it out by lowering rewards, upping prices, and nerfing the turrets, but they're just too good and I ran out of time!

fnelix 2023-05-01 11:42

Cool game, works great! I really enjoyed the art style and gameplay. Would be nice to only play with either mouse or keys (menu too). Very impressive entry!

rickylee 2023-05-01 12:52

amazing! ^^ I got very OP fully upgraded truck and just 100% boom boxes haha, delivering cargo in style. Is level humour a thing? very good level humour lol, I didn't finish yet because I got to sinusoidal and the game was freezing up from lots of mobs, and then on ambush it crashed completely :( had to start from lvl1, but dw I'll play again to beat it. Great game :)

I didn't get any audio? but you didn't opt out of ratings for audio, is there supposed to be sound?

jdah 2023-05-01 13:00

@rickylee glad you like it!! unfortunate about the crashes :( there is audio, it's just (silently) blocked by Chrome for some reason - works in firefox and safari.

slimeboos 2023-05-01 15:15

Pretty fun, a simple tower defense

jakeblake 2023-05-01 17:57

I loved it! And, as many others pointed out, it's amazing what you accomplished without an engine.

squidgod 2023-05-01 23:08

Downloaded firefox to play this - no regrets. Encountered the MK 1 turret balancing thing and the crash from having too many things on screen, but it seems like those were already mentioned. All the little effects and animations make it feel really polished. Nice work!

concurrentsquared 2023-05-02 01:03

Fun. It's a decent pixel art tower defense game. Art style looks good. Very impressive with no engine for 48 hours. Surprising to see you here.

jdah 2023-05-02 10:13

@squidgod thanks! the memory leak leading to crashes is fixed now if you want to give it another go :)

triangle-point 2023-05-02 15:37

Honestly really fun game! I like the take on the tower defense gameplay and I love how well the game is polished! It’s super impressive that this was made without an engine, I didn’t have any issues what do ever. Fantastic game!

P.S. Big fan of your channel

xfinktion 2023-05-03 22:27

Very well done! Everything fits together nicely and is quite polished. Only critique I could make is the gold gain may need some balancing in the later levels. I had enough gold to cover the screen with cannon mk2s and got enough gold back to do again the next level.

But other than that, great work! I liked that aliens could spawn where you couldn't place turrets, encouraging the use of the other tools. :D

jdah 2023-05-04 06:20

@fnelix thanks!

@xfinktion thanks, glad you like it! and yeah, if I'd had more time I would have balanced the later levels, but unfortunately I wasn't able to playtest them at all until after the submission deadline. The MK 2. cannons did end up being underpriced and overpowered for sure!

remco 2023-05-06 21:28

I couldn't get the hang of it _al all_, but reading the comments seemed like it should be easier than that. With the remark that the browser mattered with regards to sound --and that this is a homebrew engine-- in the back of my mind, I switched from firefox to chromium. While it was a lot easier (no sound this time, but I finally go to see level 4), it also hangs when there's too much happening on the screen ... which happens on level 4. What I see is that there are usually more aliens swarming the truck on Firefox, probably because they're getting offed less often (I think the turrets had a harder time aiming).

Anyway, enough of the bad news. I really liked how polished it all seemed when it did work. Like one of the better pico-8 games. The fat sound-effects where also welcome.

What I think you could do to encourage people to use the other items, is unlocking them from the start (or throwing the unlock cost way down), they're expensive enough as it is anyway, so you can't use them from the start.

Before I forget: A bit of a pet-peeve, but the price for reclamation is reduced w.r.t. the buy-price, and I wonder why? I accept that I can't do that in the real world, but what game-design purpose does it serve here to basically make the undo of the free-wheeling construction phase cost (in-game) money?

rngames 2023-05-06 22:08

✔️ It was a lot of fun seeing the aliens getting mowed down by waves of bullets.

✔️ I like the reverse take on the tower defense genre: you must defend what is moving along the track rather than destroy it.

➖ I found I could beat most levels just by filling the entire screen with the cheapest turret.

⭐ Overall: Nice take on a tower defense game!

jdah 2023-05-07 10:27

@remco what are your computer specs? it's strange that performance would be so bad, especially on an earlier level. Glad you liked the polish, I was going for exactly some kind of "better PICO-8" vibe :) The buy prices are 45% of build costs IIRC, this was introduced kind of late in the process to counteract the massive influx of cash you get in levels 8 and up which just makes the game really imbalanced later on. The first few levels ended up being challenging due to being strapped for cash but eventually it's trivial to unlock everything.

@rngames thanks! yes the MK. 1 turret strategy ended up being unfortunately a little too good. hard to balance within 48 hours!

remco 2023-05-07 10:44

@jdah Thanks for the reply. My laptop is a Thinkpad P53s, a fairly recent model. It should've been able to handle this easily I think. Before it suddenly hangs completely, there is no indication that the performance is an issue.

gamescodedogs 2023-05-18 12:11

Nice done. Great amount of work was made in just a 48 hours. I hope, you can make it a good big game. Good luck and thank you for your entry.