unchain 2024-04-16 18:23
To be honest, you are not at the same level as the other games. By far the best I tried, and likely to the best throughout the game. Love it. You deserve more ratings.
Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD55 → Neon Citadel: Guardians of the Stars
By mrtroy, snowdrama and rot_god
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 440 | 3.70 | 27 | |
| Fun | 281 | 3.78 | 28 | |
| Innovation | 462 | 3.48 | 28 | |
| Theme | 350 | 3.96 | 28 | |
| Graphics | 526 | 3.80 | 28 | |
| Audio | 545 | 3.26 | 28 | |
| Humor | 740 | 2.75 | 24 | |
| Mood | 910 | 3.21 | 28 |
To be honest, you are not at the same level as the other games. By far the best I tried, and likely to the best throughout the game. Love it. You deserve more ratings.
Nice graphics, nice music!
I had a tough time rembering the colorful combinations in the stressful times. But maybe it is the challenge :)
Good to see you again, from the kazoo guy!
@unchain Thank you! I appreciate it! We tried really hard it was a lot of work but hearing people are having fun definitely makes it worth it!
@stanov Thank you! Yeah the color combos can be tough but they do actually have a pattern! It's tough but I memorize them like this:
If you look at the general hue, there's 2 orange, and 2 blue and then a green, the Fireball Mage is `Light-Dark-Green-Dark-Light` and `Blue-Blue-Green-Orange-Orange`combined. Try looking for patterns like that in the others! Maybe that helps!
Also I still have my Kazoo with me on stream, though I don't bring it out as often as I should haha!
Nice graphic! I can really tell yall put energy in designing the pixel art and the color combination! The gameplay is also fun. I love the special effects! Only if the gameplay can be more innovative it can be better!
Loved the caste system!
@deerofblue Yeah I'd like to improve on the units to make them maybe more dynamic vs just going straight for the closest, thing they can find. Right now the pathfinding agent is fairly straightforward, enemies just go after the closest thing, in the future I'd like them to even be able to "talk" to each other so they explicitly take different paths to try and juke the player's units. Depending on how well the game does in the jam I may consider expiditing this over my current full time game if there's interest.
@samallo94 Thank you! It was a big goal of mine to be able to have a handful of units, unfortunately some of the features had to be cut, specifically things like flying units that can only be hit by ranged attack or armored units, that need attacks with armor piercing. For example right now even though it says only the Runeslinger can hit flying enemies, anything can hit the flying units as there's no system in place to be able to tell if a unit is flying or not. In a full release there would be a TON more of this kind of interactions as I love that part of strategy games.
Amazing game! It was difficul to remember combinations, but I think it was the point. Good job!
Definitely a great test of memory! I think if the runes very VERY different colors it would make them easier to quickly recognize and remember. I really dig the concept though -- solid use of the theme. The behavior of the friendly units confused me a bit at first since I expected them to pursue the enemy, but maybe I just wasn't within the expected range most of the time. Overall a super solid entry nice work!
Really cool game! I like the way you set up lanes for the enemies to follow, made me think about how to defend the village. It seems like a large part of the difficulty curve is just memorizing the summon spells at first - once I was able to commit two or three to memory it was pretty easy to keep spawning only those units, so I didn't feel like I had any incentive to try the other ones out (maybe a cooldown or something else would help here?). All that being said I enjoyed playing this!
Also.. Excellent graphics, immaculate vibes :D
This was a good idea for a jam game; simple enough to implement well and also engaging. The game was fun, although I think with some tweaks it could be very engaging. First, the spells were a bit hard to cast since I had to keep going between the runes and the spell book. Second, the guys I spawned were not very good at finding enemies. Third, the balance could be tweaked; in the end I just spawned a bunch of Titans and guys to get me mana. But overall good job!
This gameplay loop is genius I just feel like having the spell book constantly open or a bit more of a tutorial might help it be less confusing but other than that spectacular!
@westeaststudio yeah it's definitely not easy there's a trick I wonder If people are missing that you can open the book without closing the summon wheel. So you can dial it in check the book and then dial in the next one without closing it lol. But yes memorizing it is intended. Either by the position in the wheel or by the colors (there's an pattern to the colors that's supposed to help but seems like it's not as obvious as I expected) but yeah thanks for playing!
@jordantanner yeah it's mostly because we were using a palette so I didn't want to use colors not on the palette for the runes. There was also some intentional similarities that are used for repetition to create "patterns", for example `blue-blue-green-orange-orange` or `green-orange-blue-orange-blue` combine that with light and dark hues and you'll see reflection patterns like `light-dark-middle-dark-light`
As for the units melee will chase until they're out of some range but ranged units stay still mostly unless pushed. It's very basic though I'd like to make them smarter in the future! Appreciate the feedback!
@ry-kil yeah I wanted to lean even more into that but time limits got in the way. Originally the Enemies were supposed to choose different paths but right now they chose whatever they think is closest to them.
As for the spamming there was originally supposed to be like immunities and such for example some enemies would be immune to magic, and flying enemies would only be hit by the Runeslinger but unfortunately that didn't make it into the final game. There was also going to be a summon limit. So only X could be summoned at once and you could unsummon them to free up space as you needed to counter specific event types.
Anyway glad you enjoyed it! Thank you!
@aucguy yeah memorizing the spells can be difficult I attempted to leave several patterns in the choices of colors to help but it seems it's not as obvious as I had expected. The air is very short sighted it can only see about 10 units away, and will always focus the nearest enemies. That's something I would like to fix and make the Units more intelligent. And yeah balance was an issue for sure. Therev was a few things I couldn't get to so I removed the cap, originally there was going to be a limit of maybe 5-8 units and units would all have an enemy type that directly countered them like being immune to magic, so you'd need to unsummon units to change strategies on the fly, unfortunately that never made it in, so I removed the cap to prevent you from getting stuck with like 5 mages, in turn allowing late game spamming.
@easilydistracted yeah I had tricks to make the spells easier to memorize but it seems like it's not helping so that would make Sense to have the spell book open at the same time, I could Even make it interactive interesting idea. In a full release I'd definitely like a tutorial or a few. Also thought about unlocking spells over time through a campaign so It would be less to memorize all at once. Glad you liked it!
very innovative gameplay idea in my mind. I really love the visuals and the gameplay feel :) I am bad at memory the spells...reminds me a bit of monkey island in this case when you must remember the steps.
@neowhoru Thanks! Yeah seems that the spell recipes pose a challenge for more people than I thought, but I get what you mean haha. Glad you like the visuals and gameplay feel!
At first I was a bit overwhelmed by the summoning mechanics, but later on I thought they were really cool and innovative! When I figured out I could pull out the summoning wheel, then after open up the spell book, it made it a lot easier to summon units too, rather than just memorizing it (although I'm not 100% sure if that was intentional or not, but regardless, I'd say it's a plus for the game). It's an interesting way to play a tower defense game! The graphics and audio were really appealing too. Good stuff!
Screenshot 2024-04-24 140710.png
@gabrimer Yeah the spellcasting is tough initially but they eventually become second nature, I couldn't memorize them when I initially built it, and I even considered changing it to just a selection rather than the spell wheel since even I couldn't memorize them initially. But over time I learned the spells so I figured I'd leave it as an exercise to the player to learn and kind of master over time.
And yeah the recipe book is definitely supposed to be able to be opened at the same time. I have ideas of how I'd do this in the full release with more spells, where the book is a list with smaller icons and as you select runes it auto filters out the spells showing only the ones available from there(think like the way the Minecraft recipe book is on the side)
Glad you liked it!
Nice! A little hard at first for reasons you probably know, like it's hard to mentally convert the string of symbols into a pattern on the pentagon, and it wasn't immediately obvious how summons would be placed and then where the best place to place them is. After I took some notes so I didn't have to look at the book, and engaged in cheese tactics by placing all of them in one big lump in front of the city with a lot of harmonics so I was always full of crystals, I was able to beat it pretty easily. So I guess the question is how much you want to discourage cheese tactics and note taking, and how. (I know you already have ideas for how to change the spellbook layout so people won't need notes, so you're already on this.)
Possible bug I think I saw when I was taking notes - restarting from the menu after you die might not reset everything correctly? (Edit, yeah, I went back to look at something and all my guys from the last run carried over to the new run.)
It's a little hard to visually identify the different units and remember what they do, even when they aren't all in a clump. They're too similar, like they are all blue haired blue football jersey guys? So the character design could use some work for playability. They do look good though. It all generally looks good, just a bit hard to read and it could use some polish for cohesiveness.
The song is fun and it's all fun to play. Good work!
@monika Yeah so there was a ton that didn't get added that would have made the cheesing it less possible, but time is always the challenge TL;DR: I was going to add a unit limit so you had to be more deliberate with your unit choice, but because I was building features up until the last hour, I was literally at the limit of what I could add already.
One of the things I wanted to do was to have much more of a focus on type advantages, but I didn't get systems in for that. For example flying enemies could ONLY be shot by the Runeslinger, so you'd need one for that. Additionally there was supposed to be an Unsummon feature, that would let you remove something and gain the mana back, without having any passive regen, this would mean early picking up shards dropped from enemies would be how you gain mana to summon things(until harmonic mages are unlocked and then they'd drop 1 shard per wave or something) And finally there was supposed to be a Unit limit that would increase over time/level/etc. with a starting limit of 3 or 4 units.
Obviously none of that happened because time, not having the type advantages meant fireball mages were effectively way too strong as they shoot faster and therefore more DPS than the Runeslingers who's main "advantage" was that only they could shoot flying enemies, without that they are effectively useless. Brutes due to a bug have the lowest health in the game, making them terrible at the job they're SUPPOSED to do which is be a wall and absorb damage(though they have REALLY high damage) No unsummon meant you needed passive mana regen because you couldn't get the mana back from an unsummon. And Harmonic mages code was the last thing added which was hacked in to solve the "enemies don't drop enough mana, and passive regen has to be slow to prevent early spamming" but it's programmed as a "weapon" that didn't need a target, so it's functionally a "Every 5 seconds spawn a shard" and so it isn't tied to like a "spawn at the end of a round" because there's no way to get that inside the weapon class. So yeah there's a ton of things haha.
And yes someone pointed out that it doesn't reset for some reason and I'm not sure why, that's something I haven't solved yet, I haven't touched it since the jam ended really.
Anyway thank you for playing! Appreciated!
Very cool, initially I lost in the first round, but once I managed to remember the fire mage and built up an economy with the priests, I was golden. I really liked trying to frantically remember the order of a specific unit as the wave is coming towards me! Also the graphics were really nice :)
Awesome idea! At first I did really bad because I'm terrible at these types of short term memory games, but after a few failures I managed to memorize some of them and made it a lot further, but still lost... Then I stole @monika's cheese tactic and won :D
The graphics and particle effects here are great. Balancing issues aside, I really liked the concept. Casting spells manually is much more entertaining than just picking units from a menu.
@mathead It's mostly expected there's a learning curve initially as you figure stuff out but yeah seems like everyone gets the rhythm eventually haha, if you read other comments you'll see there was some method to the maddness in the patterns of the colors. But thank you, glad you liked the graphics!
@ale Yeah the other thing people don't pick up on which is totally my bad but you can open both the wheel and book at the same time, so you can "enter 1, check book, enter 2, check book, enter 3..." only when you close the wheel or complete a spell does the spell reset.
I'd be maybe worried that with more spells it'd be to hard to remember, the 5 spells maybe up to 10 max I think is the limit of "memorization" since the patterns aren't inherently intuitive. I've made a few comparisons to Minecraft but the crafting recipe's are 'intuitive' there, for example 3 wood planks in a line makes wood slabs, items in the shape of an axe makes an axe, once you learn it it's hard not to remember. These don't have that kind of intuitive pattern so having like a "spell autocomplete" like I've mentioned in other comments might be a solution to the spell memorization.
Making sure everything had particles and stuff was a big focus for me this time as my last game lacked them, so it lacked juice so I made sure to prioritize that. But yeah definitely didn't have time to balance, with the actual damage resistances and stuff there might be less cheese as I mentioned, but it happens, it tends to be a weakness of game jam games. Balance is always hard in the short time frame since there's limited time for playtesting.
Thanks for playing!
I did figure out I could open up the summoning book while the summoning wheel was open, plus I could click and work the summons at the same time but it was really hard to easily memorise any of the patterns as they felt like they had no underlaying pattern. I just wanted to rely on just one as I could remember that single pattern. Would really help to have them able to be seen at the same time.
I think in my second play of the game one of the monsters was left over and pretty much instantly destroyed the big building/main base? (just tested it again, and yes the monsters aren't cleared up after losing).
Menu feels a little clunky as I have to click the button to get to the next page rather than a single click to continue (if it isn't that then the transition time is too slow).
However the gameplay is really interesting and the summoning actual felt like summoning creatures rather than just selecting from a list like any other tower defense game. Interesting concept overall!
@kjscott Yeah someone mentioned that it didn't get cleared correctly I looked into it and I'm still not sure how to fix that, I completely switch scenes and I don't use any "DontDestroyOnLoad" code so it should but not sure. I'd have to investigate more closely.
As for the Summons they do have patterns but they are primarily in the colors, I've mentioned a few times in other comments but as an example the fireball mage is `Light-Dark-Green-Dark-Light` and `Blue-Blue-Green-Orage-Orange` While the Harmonic mage is the same spell but with dark/light reversed.
I assume by menu you mean like the start screen to the controls screen, and yeah the transition(minus loading time) takes one second and can't be interrupted so yeah if you click before it's faded in completely, the scene manager ignores it to prevent breaking the transition manager which breaks if you send it a new scene before the full transition finishes due to callbacks.
Very nice game. Ive found a lot of games this jam have leaned into the idea of memorising spells as a challenge and this game does that well. Very satisfying to remember the combination for a particular unit off the top of my head!
The only criticism I really have is that the collision seems a little rough sometimes, it seemed like my rune slingerse and fire mages weren't dealing damage sometimes. This might just be an issue with unit stacking though, it didn't seem to affect much.
Good work!
Amazing tower-defense game! At first it was hard to memorize the spells, but once I memorized the cheapest one, I just spammed it and bought enough time to learn the new ones! Well done!
Overall, great submission! I personally struggled to memorise the spells well, i think largely because of the "light blue" vs "dark blue". It's definitely a skill issue, but I think having 5 more distinct colors would make it much easier to pick up and go.
I loved the art style, it was very well done, and I really appreciated the instructive UI (most game jam games completely overlook explaining how to play the game haha).
Great job, and keep up the amazing work!
@verti Yeah it's a bit of a learning curve but once you get it, it's fairly easy. I added the spells themselves on the third day and by the end of the jam I had memorized them so it's not impossible but I can see where the challenge lies for some people. Interesting, I'd have to look into that, if they arrived on the same frame then they'd do the damage on the same frame so it might be that they travel the same speed and launched at the same time leading to them hitting the same frame(very common especially if the units see the enemies on the same frame as well since they'd be fully in sync). Adding like a random offset to shooting might help here just so they don't arrive at exactly the same time, but would mean that some units are less responsive to something entering their vision sphere. Something to consider for sure
@leorean Yeah the expectation is you'd need to use a few of the fireball mages before you get access to other spells, that's why you start with only 4 mana. But yeah definitely the memorization has a learning curve.
@ohfiddlediddle Yeah I feel like a lot of people struggled there, I did try with more colors initially but the problem with more colors is you actually lose a lot of the ability to do "patterns" since patterns rely on thew similarities between the colors, I think maybe adding more deliberate shapes like "blues are also always roundish, while reds are lines, and greens are polygonal" would have helped but, from my initial testing, not inherently more colors.
The choice to only use 3 colors and 2 shades was deliberate as the colors were at one point "Red, Magenta, Blue, Green, Yellow" but I found it actually a lot harder since there's no obvious groupings here, no good similarities, they felt more random. I had one that was a "light to dark" sorting order or a "cool colors and warm colors" grouping but then hit stuff like "Will people consider #FF00FF a cool or a warm color? it's literally 50/50 cool/warm Blue/Red"
But yeah the art style was something that we established early, we went with voxels just because I knew that we'd be needing to make a fair number of models, and it would have been a lot more time/work if we had decided to do them as low poly models instead. I was trying to focus on variety, as past jam games that has been something that has been lacking, enemy variety, player variety, item variety etc.
And yeah, I've found adding a quick visual instruction screen tends to be super useful to help people jump in without reading the description and such, I just wish I had more time to add in the options menu and stuff where you could look at the controls after starting the game.
Anyway thanks for playing!