Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD55 → Tremblewood
By hawkin, tempest-smh, KingPotatoCannon, gamepad-coder and Andy Jandl
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 105 | 4.09 | 33 | |
| Fun | 49 | 4.19 | 33 | |
| Innovation | 484 | 3.46 | 33 | |
| Theme | 52 | 4.40 | 33 | |
| Graphics | 260 | 4.17 | 33 | |
| Audio | 267 | 3.73 | 30 | |
| Humor | 609 | 2.98 | 27 | |
| Mood | 270 | 3.91 | 32 |
The damage of towers can be made a bit higher, since you can practically snowball the level with a ton of spawns. Great concept and the graphics do bring this oldschool RTS style gameplay. Maybe summons control as units can be experimented on
one of my favorites I have played! summoning a huge army that only gets bigger was such a fun thing! The art style was awesome and the different types of enemies really brought a smile to my face when I unlocked a new one! Once I got to the end I was like "that was a pretty good game" and I totally think this is a game worth fleshing out into a full game! If you do decide to go further with the game, for sure add more types of troops, but maybe consider a way to combine them together to make bigger ones or something! Really really great job!
Excellent game! It fits the theme, the pixel graphics are nice. The gameplay was addictive, I only wish now there were extra levels! The only issue I had was with the audio, even when setting every slider at maximum value it the volume was quite low. Keep up with the good work!
Probably my fav so far. Great job!
WOW! Honestly very impressive. The concept is amazing and I can really see this becoming a way bigger game. Just make sure that the sounds don't become annoying. The pick-up sound was great and felt satisfying but most of the rest I felt were just annoying. I couldn't even figure out what did what sound. Well obviously animation would be great but considering the time restraint the sprites are already impressive. Some of the guards were getting stuck behind walls so maybe see if that's fixable. I also found the game a bit easy for my liking. Once you had a substantial army, nothing could get to you. But I being very picky. The game is amazing and honestly one of the best i have played yet. Good job!
Thank you @shaved-viking! I appreciate the note about the sound. I realized late that the levels were lower for most systems. Hopefully you were able to boost your system levels to hear it alright!
@poutine-studio thank you for the comments! The team will be happy to read them, especially about the art!
I agree the sounds might become a bit much when you have a big army. Perhaps I could implement a filter to limit maximum requests at once.
I really dig the atmosphere and visuals, and nice touch with being able to see character when behind other objects. Watching the farmers run away was another great addition :)
I made it to the big cannons, but I had trouble making my army move there since the old buildings kept respawning Maybe having some way to give an objective to the units could be used to solve this?
Overall I had a great time with the game, really well done! :D
Had a good time with this one. Picking up the drops from all the enemies was super satisfying. And at one point I spammed a bunch of goblins and they went on a rampage. Very fun. There's a few issues with the default volume level, it should be a bit louder, but it's not game-ruining by any means.
@themixedmaster @shaved-viking
We actually just pushed a minor fix for the audio levels, since many people were saying they could not hear it at all. I'm sure some people didn't even realize there was audio to hear. Thank you for mentioning it!
A great time, takes some understanding of the game which is good. Sadly it is short, i wanted more! A more scaled difficulty would be cool, but it is a good game!
Super nice little game ! i really enjoy the mood, it's not overwhelming despite having a lot of summons, the only downside i would say is that they can block you so it can be hard sometimes to get the materials, but a cool idea well executed !
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Nice entry. I enjoyed how it felt. Destroying everything and summoning the units felt good. Really fun to try and optimize how to beat it using the least. I think you could get the numbers pretty low utilizing some strats where you dodge the towers distracting them from your units. Took me over an hour of optimizing, but I got it down to just 6 zombies. You might be able to use less with a skeleton or something instead.
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Great concept, i love the low poly art style of it mixed in with the 2D style of the characters. Gameplay vise it does feel a bit easy so mby the knight spawn rate could be increased or the towers could do more dmg. Other than that i have no other problems with it (the audio levels were fine for me and didnt need to change anything). Good job!
Staying back while thinking about summoning positions is one of my favorite parts of this theme. It felt relaxing and fun to play, partially because I did not need to micro the monsters after summoning them and they were smart enough to have their targets be the units that hit back most of the time. I also like the minions having generous amounts of health so the player does not have to be too precise with them.
The starting menu graphic felt a little jarring to me with 3D behind 2D, and the music gets repetitive if I wait on the start screen, but I'm not sure how I would change it, especially because it communicates the controls well and is representative of the 2D over 3D to come. Zooming in on the characters and the skeleton crowd is a fun touch.
The shadows and unused gold resource nodes are a nice touch to make the game feel retro and immersive. How was it like programming the triggers and logic for units?
Very polished and quite fun! I'd definitely come back to play more levels.
The villagers rebuilding certain structures while the city is under siege was a nice touch. The game was a bit too easy after the first barracks fell, but I still had fun watching the carnage.
Wow love it, so addictive, please make more levels
Surprisingly satisfying! I've played a bunch of games this jam with similar premise, but this one was probably the most engaging one so far. It felt very compelling to gather parts and watch my army lay waste upon the entire kingdom. I only wish there was a way to direct the troups, maybe some kind of pebble you could throw, I found myself moving back and forth whenever a new tower popped which couldve been alleviated by range direction. Its an awesome power trip, well done!
The gameplay feels nice. Good job and congratulations!
Favourite graphics of the jam so far. Nicely done!!!
It was fun, nice game. Can make little sandbox from it potentially, like you have heavy guarded castle in center of map and villages around it. You can raid villages for resources, raise army of undeads and try to siege a castle.
Great game! I wish it was slightly more faster paced, but I've had a lot of fun with it!
Fun little game! I like that you kept everything low poly and pixelated it looks really nice, good job on the shaders.
The game itself was a bit easier than I would have liked but I rlly enjoyed causing all the destruction and it felt satisfying collecting all the resources in order to summon more troops. Experience was polished and it was to understand what to do. This could be he base for a pretty nice game if you consider expanding on the concept
Good entry!
@spliddo, @rendow Glad you enjoyed the game! You mentioned some good ideas for summon control, like a traditional RTS. That was some scope that we knew would be hard to fit in, and we kind of liked the idea of a zombie horde not always doing what you wanted. We found some strategy in getting close to your target and summoning them. But the system could definitely use more tuning and development to be even better!
I was similar to @NBumgardner and others: summoning a huge army and letting them rip through town felt fun in a different way than micromanaging.
Our lead dev @tempest-smh can talk more about the AI implementation. It comes down to available targets within a distance. We actually weren't sure why they were running back to retarget the barracks when they were at the castle. It's something to look into!
@spliddo, @franciscorp, @cody-holt, @avaclava, @ditam, @sodoj, @Tetracold
Thank you for playing and giving feedback! You all mentioned the level of difficulty, which was the subject of many discussions during the jam for our team. A bit too hard, and some people won't make it to the final challenge. A bit too easy, some people might feel bored.
We had a good system for balancing, and it even supports multiple levels of difficulty, but we found out it still actually takes a bit of time to tune everything! I think if we had been able to provide a button to turn on a "hard" mode, that would have been awesome!
We'd love to put one in for the post-jam update so that you can really test your stuff!
@spliddo, @Sicosiber, @shaved-viking, @Avaclava, @orbitaldot, @Tetracold
Thank you all for your feedback about the art style! The team is loving those comments. The vision from the get-go was for a retro RTS, and that drove the audio and visual style. There was a redesign on the scene textures once the 2D sprites were dropped in, to make sure it all felt cohesive enough. And for audio, I applied an amount of bit crunch where it was effective.
@NBumgardner noticed a lot of details on the start menu, which I always enjoy making to setup the mood of the game. The 3D assets in the back were actually the same as the level, but I'll need to take another look. It's possible that I wasn't applying the same pixel shader, or because the camera was much closer, everything was crisper and clashed more.
Nice game! At first I was quite confused what was actually happening and kept losing quickly. I didn't understand that the health bars belonged to the houses, I thought they belonged to my minions, hehe. Once I got the hang of it, it was quite fun t summon minions, hide behind them while the fight for me and then collecting all the 'rewards'! And then suddenly the game ended, I won! I didn't really see why, so I played it again (and then I saw it).
Art and music are both very nice. I had fun playing it. Overall, well done! :clap:
Really cool graphical style, it's got real billboard sprites on pre rendered backgrounds vibes. There's a good sense of moving towards knocking down the castle, and enemy spawning buildings popping up every now and then stops it from feeling a bit too straightforward.
yo this was rad as hecks! my only complaint is that it ends too soon (and sometimes my dudes would surround me and am stuck between them xD)! i wish theres a lil more incentive for playing more even if its a simple timer that shows at the end to encourage a faster run or posting score in comments, although someones comment above where they use only 6 skellies is pretty impressive
@papaver thank you for sticking with it and figuring it out! We could always improve our feedback and tutorial :)
@itsboats thanks dude! We experimented with letting the player pass through mobs, but there was some reason we didn't like that either. I agree that a timer would have been a good idea! Listing the resources as a score doesn't actually mean much after all, since I could just sit there and farm the town for a long time >:) and I don't know HOW the guy did it with 6. Our game must be broken XD
Great lofi graphics and vibe, and it was fun spamming tons of summons! Good music as well.
I didn't really get the strategy other than spam all summons close together and try and hide from the arrows
@neontropics thank you for the comment! I think you're right: summoning the masses is pretty much an assured win. We were okay with that, because it felt fun being powerful.
Most of the strategy I have found is accommodate for the lack of control of the mobs. For example, if I want them to attack a particular building, I'll spawn them near that building.
With our stretch goals to increase the capabilities of the town build system, we imagined the need for more strategy to emerge!
@itsboats We didn't get to the passing through mobs feature until later in the game jam unfortunately. I tried experimenting with at least being able to pass through friendly summoned mobs, but then it felt really inconsistent and we didn't have enough time to maybe allow passing through enemies but doing a little damage or knockback. Love how that's something you noticed as well :) Thanks for playing!
Lovely well-rounded game! This was probably one of the most fun to play games, it felt very satisfying to destroy the whole town with your minions in the end :D The core loop and mechanic is really solid!
Absolutely loved it! Was genuinely disappointed when the game ended - I could play a few hours of this, especially if you were to nail a progression system. Fantastic job on all fronts - maybe my favorite game of the jam so far.
Also loved it, and also would've easily spent much more time in it. Love these crowd control destruction games, love playing as a villain. The balance requires some tweaking though, the first time I got completely overwhelmed by an army of knight, and the second time I completely steamrolled everything. I wonder what could have been done about that - adding more enemy spawning points, maybe some time-critical locations that need to be destroyed fast, maybe an ability to call the nearby skeletons to come closer? Great entry!
The sound effect when you pick up resources. Its soo damm satisfying! Now I want to play more :D
@zinkler I really like your suggestion! It doubles down on the "summon" theme, even. Hah!
One design decision we made was to make the player mobile and the summoning portals appear nearby. This forces the player to move (possibly into danger). Calling your mobs back toward you (another type of "summon") might reinforce that risk/reward!