Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → LD55 → Summoned Army
| Category | Rank | Score | Count | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 967 | 3.21 | 32 | |
| Fun | 544 | 3.48 | 32 | |
| Innovation | 907 | 3.00 | 33 | |
| Theme | 757 | 3.45 | 33 | |
| Graphics | 1072 | 2.04 | 33 | |
| Mood | 1158 | 2.51 | 33 |
I like how you do have to vary your strategy to progress further. I did manage to clear the first five stages without changing my unit types but after that you kind of have to. Visuals were a little plain but the game mechanics were there! Nice job
I like this a lot. Simple, but sweet. I also got thorugh the first 2 levels without doing anything, but got stuck on level 6. The changing of unit types is a bit fiddly. I wish you could use the mouse, although the mass-changes does help. The music reminds me abit of WarCraft II, love that
@ooboob Thank you lots for the feedback! I didn't anticipate someone wishing to use the mouse, so that's a big learning for me 🙏! Glad you enjoyed it!
The levels where the opponent has more portals do get tough. I tuned the game so that there is a chance of winning even when the opponent has 2 more portals – really tough, but the chance is there, which makes you want to accomplish it.
Some of the tuning was that 1) the units do have favourable matchups, rock-paper-scissors like, and 2) I increased the number of summoning portals the players have. 5vs6 is harder than 10vs11. (1 more portal makes a bigger difference when you have less portals).
Wow this is interesting! On level 6 I got a really tug of war going. Can't beat level 7 :(. I would like to change the position of my towers to try more strategies, clicking on a portal to change its type would also be great.
Solid Submission!
Overall one of the best strategy games I've played so far. The first few levels were quite easy which I liked as it allowed me to get used to the game. Then the levels became more of a challenge requiring some time to solve but it ended up feeling more satisfying when I finally won.
More focus could have been done fleshing out the art but overall great work!
@meepster @thehumanspooder @vinzbad Thank you lots for sharing your experience, I appreciate it a lot, and it's a big part of what makes it meaningful to participate! đź’™ I'm happy to hear that some of the things that I aimed for and tweaked the game for was felt by you. e.g.: - having a few trivial rounds to give you time to try things out and understand the game (but not too many to make it boring / slow) - having to vary your strategy to get through the tougher rounds. Hopefully even requiring you to change your setup during the round itself - shift to mass change - having some tough levels, but beatable (until it becomes too hard)
> @vinzbad: I would like to change the position of my towers to try more strategies
I felt that too! At the very least it should be a game mode or an option. There's a bit of randomness on the starting position of the summoning portals, which randomise every turn... you can sometimes take advantage of that to position one unit in front of another
Simple but fun! The first five levels were quite easy, I didn't have to change much, but the sixth level got me, I couldn't beat it.
Cool game! I had a hard time strategizing about what exactly I could do to counter my opponents setup, it seemed, to me at least, like the outcomes of battles were fuzzy, and it was hard to see where my setup is wrong. I just sent my soldiers out to battle and hoped for the best, which is still a very fun feeling! I'd be curious to know how exactly you are handling the collisions between the large number of units. It worked well for the most part, but I often noticed that some enemy units would clip into each other, perfectly overlapping. I imagine this is due to some necessary shortcuts taken for performance, and it wasn't anything game breaking. Nice work!
A cool little tug-of-war RTS! Reminded me a lot of cool old Flash games I've spent a lot of time playing. :D
One thing I think it could do better is on the visual presentation style. On one hand, by making the game scale so the game area fills the entire window. Right now everything takes place in this tiny square area in the center, and the units are so small it's sometimes difficult to figure out what's going on in small areas of the battle.
Another thing would be some better player feedback, maybe explaining game elements a bit better. For example, I've figured out the inside of the unit is it's health bar (as it dropped on taking damage and got back up when healed by the Healer), but a lot of times it looked to me like the unit didn't have any HP left, yet it remained on the field, still able to take several more hits before going down. Also, it looks like units can be selected (as hovering on them puts a thicker border around them), but is there any point to it? You can't control them, and selecting a unit doesn't seem to affect its attack or health in any way.
Also - did you submit the game in the wrong category by accident? You are using a CC music track from external source, which is allowed in the Jam category, but not in the Compo category.
Overall, it's a pretty cool entry! The rock/paper/scissors mechanic of units gives it a pretty good tactical depth, and while the game is easy to get into, it gives you enough challenge after a few levels to keep you interested. Well done!
@galactical Thank you so much for your feedback! I appreciate it lots
> Cool game! I had a hard time strategizing about what exactly I could do to counter my opponents setup, it seemed, to me at least, like the outcomes of battles were fuzzy, and it was hard to see where my setup is wrong. I just sent my soldiers out to battle and hoped for the best, which is still a very fun feeling!
Sorry to hear! I'm not surprised. I've heard it from other people, and I can see how depending on how the rounds go for you, it may have been difficult to spot the advantages and disadvantages that a unit has against another. I was thinking that a campaign mode with "pre-designed puzzles" could help alleviate this, and also provide more content where there is a surmountable amount of challenge. Happy to hear ideas!
(Spoiler about the rock-paper-scissor nature of the units)
By design, the following _should_ be true: - Warriors beat Archers - Archers beat Healers - Healers "beat" Warriors
(Spoiler about the values under the hood driving the units)
- Warriors have 10HP and do 1dmg every 1s. - Archers have 5HP and do 2dmg every 2s. And they take double-damage from Warriors. - Healers have 5HP and heal 1hp every 1s.
(Spoiler about how the rock-paper-scissors takes place in practice)
Warriors take down archers in 3 hits. Archers take warriors down in 5 hits. However, archers can attack at a distance, so they are able to hit the warrior once before the warrior gets to them. Additionally, if there's any ally unit between the archer and the warrior, the warrior will go for that unit... so while warriors beat archers, that is if they can get to the archers.
Healers "beat" warriors in the sense that they can heal as much hp as warriors can damage. Additionally, if you have 2 columns of units, warriors on the column behind the fight can't really contribute to the fight (except pushing). Healers on the 2nd column, behind the fight, _are_ able to heal units in the front line. So it's very difficult or impossible for 2 columns of warriors to beat 2 columns of healers. Also, any damage the warriors take from archers (behind the healers) will not be able to be healed, unless they have healers too.
Archers "beat" healers in the sense that 2 archers beat 3 healers. 2 archers will deal 4 damage to a healer (hopefully they focus on the same one), and then healers have to react and come to heal the unit. However, due to reaction times, they will only be able to heal the unit once before archers are able to strike it again for 4 damage. Meaning that the healer or archer will be gone. It's a different story if the archer is attacking a warrior given they have 10hp, so the reaction time by the healer does not affect much.
> I’d be curious to know how exactly you are handling the collisions between the large number of units. It worked well for the most part, but I often noticed that some enemy units would clip into each other, perfectly overlapping. I imagine this is due to some necessary shortcuts taken for performance, and it wasn’t anything game breaking. Nice work!
Every unit has the following code:
// collisions const closestUnit = getClosestEntity(this, { type: Unit }) if (closestUnit) { const distance = pointToPointDistance(this, closestUnit) if (distance < 19) { const dx = distance/10 * (this.x - closestUnit.x) / distance const dy = distance/10 * (this.y - closestUnit.y) / distance this.x += dx this.y += dy closestUnit.x -= dx closestUnit.y -= dy } }
So it slightly pushes the closest unit (that is <19 distance) away from itself, and it pushes itself a bit away from that unit.
I suspect that by only considering the closest unit for collision, it doesn't work well when too many units are pushing against each other.
So it's not really for performance, rather that's the way I wrote it, and didn't have time / was not a priority to make it better :)
Thank you again for your feedback! <
@lcstark Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts, I appreciate it lots!!
> A cool little tug-of-war RTS! Reminded me a lot of cool old Flash games I’ve spent a lot of time playing. :D
đź’™
> One thing I think it could do better is on the visual presentation style. On one hand, by making the game scale so the game area fills the entire window. Right now everything takes place in this tiny square area in the center, and the units are so small it’s sometimes difficult to figure out what’s going on in small areas of the battle.
I agree. Certainly something that could be improved. For now, one can use the browser zoom feature to zoom in, but that's not obvious to the player.
> Another thing would be some better player feedback, maybe explaining game elements a bit better. For example, I’ve figured out the inside of the unit is it’s health bar (as it dropped on taking damage and got back up when healed by the Healer), but a lot of times it looked to me like the unit didn’t have any HP left, yet it remained on the field, still able to take several more hits before going down.
I agree that may not be intuitive. I think that can be improved by testing what the HP circle looks like with different amounts of HP, and tweaking the minimum size of the circle before the unit dies. Otherwise, like you say, it gets so small that it's hard to tell how much HP is left, or you may be lead to think that there's something buggy / wrong with the game, that the units should be dead (most likely they just have 1 or 2 HP left).
> Also, it looks like units can be selected (as hovering on them puts a thicker border around them), but is there any point to it? You can’t control them, and selecting a unit doesn’t seem to affect its attack or health in any way.
Yeah, good spot! That's because I experimented with allowing the player to hover a unit to heal it (as a special power). However, after playtesting, I felt that it distracted too much from the core of the game, and gave a sense of unfairness, taking away the satisfaction / accomplishment of selecting units well. So I removed the healing power, but forgot to remove the feedback that shows you which unit you'd be selecting. Something to remove for sure.
> Also - did you submit the game in the wrong category by accident? You are using a CC music track from external source, which is allowed in the Jam category, but not in the Compo category.
I've changed the category to the Jam, thank you for pointing it out! It feels unclear currently that it is a requirement for the Jam.
> Overall, it’s a pretty cool entry! The rock/paper/scissors mechanic of units gives it a pretty good tactical depth, and while the game is easy to get into, it gives you enough challenge after a few levels to keep you interested. Well done!
Thank you lots again for playing it and especially for sharing your thoughts!! <3
it certainly lacking in art, pretty cool seeing the fight tho, good job!
Very fun game. I only wish there was some other difficulty differentiator than enemy portal count - something more gradual.
I really liked this. Simple enough to understand but complex enough to keep getting more interesting. I felt very clever when I thought to send warriors from the centre to get to fight faster while letting my other units move in a bit slower from the further away portals. Feels like a well balanced game which is hard thing to get done in a jam so well done.
@lisek-gagatek I 100% agree. The game is mostly only enjoyable when it's challenging, but beatable. And the increase in difficulty by number of portals is too big at a time.
Any ideas?
@dan-allison Thank you for the feedback Dan! It's really interesting to hear about what you felt, thought, tried. I feel the offset in the position of the spawning portals also causes one to maybe pick the ones closest to the enemy side to be used for spawning "front-line" units.
Best wishes đź’™
@dasilvacontin Hmm, I have a couple ideas, but without testing I'm not sure how well they'd work. You could: - Decouple enemy spawn cooldown from player's. Make enemies spawn interval smaller to increase difficulty without increasing portal count. E.g. instead of going from 10 portals to 11 (10% power increase), reduce spawn cooldown by 5%. - Introduce other units for enemy. Could be just reskins with a bit increased stats. E.g. instead of normal swordsman, archer and shaman, make enemies goblin spearman, slinger and shaman that work exactly the same. Introduce troll with club in later levels that is essentially a swordsman, but with 150%hp and 75%damage (or something along those lines, you get the idea). - Add a cannon to enemy castle that attacks your units. You can adjust it's damage gradually as level number increases. The cannon could have max attack range, so that it's harder for your units to break through, but wouldn't affect defending. It would make the fight more "bounce-y". - Figure out how spawn positions influence the battle. Move them to make levels easier or harder - e.g. in certain levels, place some of the ally spawners further from the battlefield, so that the units arrive later. Or make enemy spawners not in a single line, but two and always spawn swordsmen in a first row and archers/healers in the second one.
I really love these minimalistic browser games with simple graphics, but interesting idea. This one is definetely my type! One little suggestion would be to add a way to zoom in/out of the game, as on my monitor entire battlefield was taking only 30% of screen space. Nice job!
Hmm getting a blank page when I open the game. No errors in the JS console, and the page is loading (I can see a canvas and script tag in the DOM). I am on Firefox on Linux. Happy to come back and review if there's a fix!
Nice little strategy game. These kinds of ideas can easily be expanded upon. You probably want to have a bit more a-symmetry going on since this is a PvE kind of game. You can think of specific challenges the player can overcome and how a different unit composition or location can help with that. Display some obvious weakness in the eenmy placement but have them spawn more than teh player, so the player has to be smarter.
Nice game! I enjoyed watching the little guys fight. I only used the "set all" commands, and the same pattern (one wave of warriors, one wave of healers, then all archers until the end) beat every level I played, so some variation/balancing is probably needed. Overall, I had fun.
Thank you lots for the ideas and direction, @sam-minh !! Super valuable.
Thank you @maymay @hermitgamesmiths @deltamain for your feedback too, very useful đź’™
@lisek-gagatek Those are some great out of the box ideas, thank you so much! đź’™
Using javascript to make browser based game is obviously something novel! The game itself is fun to play, I suggest you could probably improve on graphic? Tho minimalism looks just fine.
@creeper-nade Thank you for the feedback! :)
I've been making browser-based games using JavaScript (including multiplayer online games) since 2012!!
Very interesting game, although levels 1 to 4 were very easy, level 5 was very hard, and level 6 impossible :) Feel free to take a look at our game, it is based on a very similar concept, where you have a choice between three similar options, balanced in a rock/paper/scissors way!
great entry, really fit the theme. New type of invocation would be nice (maybe some special type that take multiple turn to arrive) With some polish (artwork, new type etc..), this could be a nice phone game.
Great job guys