FoonLudum Dare ExplorerLD56 → Paper Russula

Paper Russula

By JojoPalambas and revetoon

View on ldjam.com

CategoryRankScoreCount
Overall1114.0522
Fun2823.7022
Innovation254.2222
Theme2763.9722
Graphics2054.2222
Audio634.1222
Humor4953.1321
Mood3473.7522

Comments

dahliainosensu 2024-10-08 16:18

Unfortunatlly it does not open:(

pacelin 2024-10-08 21:46

Hello developers! Your zip archive is not full, please rebuild game and upload again. Game cannot launch now.

rodney-fan 2024-10-08 23:38

unfortunately cannot run game sounds cool tho

jojopalambas 2024-10-09 22:23

Hi @dahliainosensu @pacelin and @rodney-fan Thanks a lot for letting us know! Mistakes were made but are now fixed, the .exe version should work properly now! Don't hesitate to tell us if the errors persists!

pacelin 2024-10-10 00:53

@jojopalambas Yeap, it works! Thank you so much for the gaming experience you provided! I really liked this turn-based strategy game! An interesting idea.

I didn't find any bugs, I can say a few words about the balance:

1. Try using INCREMENTAL RND. (For example, when I didn't get a tile with electricity, I would like to be more likely to get it next time).

2. The game has a point of no return - when the enemy crawls to the field, it becomes too difficult to control, because initially the strategy is based on a good attack, not defense) Perhaps this can be corrected by increasing the field, largely because enemy tiles interfere too much in certain situations.

3. The visual and the soundtrack are excellent. I really liked this game. I would like to see more mechanics in it, and also to make enemy tiles more convenient for the player)

rodney-fan 2024-10-10 06:35

@jojopalambas I just downloaded the newest build im super excited to try it out tmr will update this post once i have done so!

revetoon 2024-10-10 08:17

@pacelin Thank you so much for those detailed feedbacks. To be frank we didn't haver enough time to prooftest the game balance so you feedbacks are even more precious. We did find that it was too hard to kill enemies once they become too close to the bottom tiles. I think we'll make a little tweak update to balance a bit more the gameplay. :)

jahwffrey 2024-10-12 03:41

I really liked it! The different mushrooms were cool and cute and I really liked the idea of needing to power them and plan ahead for what the next row that's going to be powered is going to be. Maybe I wish the enemies moved more often than they did but it was a pretty contemplative game anyway, it doesn't need to be faster. Good job!

turturi 2024-10-19 13:47

Fun game, I liked it. The graphic and music are amazing. The idea that you can't just put your weapons, you need also to power them is nice. It gives more strategy aspect to the game. As some previous comments state, it needs to be a bit more balanced. The larger field would be nice, so the trap shroom make more sense. Also at certain point you have all the field full, so maybe some button to skip placing more mushrooms would be nice.

honey-pony 2024-10-20 00:54

Fun little game, but very difficult! I gave this a few tries, including after I realized I could chain together activators, and I wasn't quite able to put together a winning strategy. My high score is 11.

It seems like the available space is very restricted by the random starting activators. My final run I got what appeared to be a very nice set -- with both of them in the bottom right corner -- although I was not quite able to make anything good out of it.

I'm not quite sure how to actually put together a winning build. It seems to me like you need to have Russulas shooting in each column at least twice per cycle, which should be possible with some careful planning, but it also requires a very activator-heavy set of draws and I'm not sure if it's possible to construct it in time. It also seems like the short range of the Russulas means you more or less need them on the top two rows so that the rest of your build doesn't get destroyed (i.e. any lower, and anything critical above them will be destroyed by enemies before they fire).

It seems there must be some way to do it, given the scores in the 70s or so on the scoreboard. :smile:

I do like the puzzle here. It seems like a very restrictive set of tools available, especially given how difficult it is to route energy--from what I can tell there is no way to route a bunch of energy to all columns at once, any activator chain can only activate up to half of the columns due to the way that the horizontal activators work plus the limited number of rows.

It also is fun working through those first few enemies and trying to get a build going. Trying to strategize how to incrementally build and how to attack the enemies that are already present is a nice little challenge. I'm just not sure how to get any runs past that initial point!

One note: The Switch-shroom's description is incorrect, the Left one says it redirects enemies rightward and vice versa, which was very confusing.

carraka 2024-10-20 02:53

The music was delightful! Somehow I found myself playing for over an hour. I still haven't figured out the strategy, but it's definitely fun to try to figure it out. Well done!

prostocupoftea 2024-10-20 06:45

So fun! i did replay it a couple of times, really nice, kinda rng dependant but thats not that bad

I really enjoyed the graphics and the music was really cool, the mechanic sounds fresh and innovative and was a treat to play, really cool!

tommy 2024-10-20 09:45

The mechanics of this game are pretty interesting, even tough it takes a little time to get them and understand them properly. Great work on the aestethics, that feel really polished!

jojopalambas 2024-10-20 15:31

@honey-pony Thanks for the feedback! It is true that the game is hard, it is the main concern we had doing this and we sadly couldn't spend as much time as we wanted on player understanding and gameplay balance.

Actually one of the 60-70 scores is from myself, and I agree that it needs a very good understanding of some patterns to get there. We may make a more balanced (and less punishing) version after the game jam to fix that, as we feel that apart from this the game has some potential that could be better exploited with some more towers and real endgame gameplay.

I hope you still had fun, thanks again for the feedback!

PS: we take note of the description bug you found, we will fix it!

ftz 2024-10-21 02:45

Great game, the graphics worked really well. Was a bit hard at the start to understand when things triggered.

ategon 2024-10-21 06:08

Pretty fun game but has a couple issues with balancing that would be the biggest thing to work on in post jam. Had to do a few runs to figure out what the game wanted me to do.

Early game currently relies on rng (with getting good enemy activator placements and then not getting screwed over by the options it gives you to build). And then late game there's nothing to do currently once you finish building up your defense and need to just keep placing the same plants on themselves over and over while slowly waiting for things to progress.

Some things that could improve on that if you do post jam work is having things unlocked and put in the pool over time as the run progresses to give reasons for changing the defense and rigging the rng a bit at the start to guarantee certain parts that are needed to survive (especially after the first enemy spawns).

Music was nice and complimented the gameplay well (although was a bit repetitive but thats fine for being a jam game) and the art was nice with the little animations each plant did. One thing that could improve on that a bit it having a indicator for the plant youre building when hovering over a tile (e.g. showing it there semi transparent)

This was the defense I made (and that kept me alive from a score of somewhere between 5-10 forget where all the way up to where I died). Ended up dying due to the push plant on the right not being able to push due to having too much of a swarm of enemies and then the enemy getting close and destroying my attack russula. (probably could have survived a tiny bit longer if I replaced the useless activator on the right with something else)

Screenshot 2024-10-21 015523.png

First 100+ run

Screenshot 2024-10-21 020048.png

hawkin 2024-10-21 19:04

Very nice graphics and animations! The strategy was pretty deep, as others have pointed out. It does seem to require a lot of experimentation, which I think is fine.

I wish some things were better explained with in-game feedback. Not all of the defenses seemed to fire each round, even when they were powered. The reason for that wasn't clear, and I felt like that hindered my experimentation.

Otherwise, all of the different types of tiles were neat and fun to play with to try build a solid defense. It was definitely a unique take on the tower defense style, which I like!

jhax 2024-10-21 19:31

Mechanics are really interesting, takes a good bit of thinking to figure out the best way to approach things! Not sure I stumbled upon a particularly good strategy, but I enjoyed myself! The fact that you have to place an item every turn adds a nice edge to the difficulty as well. Art and music both really fit the vibe.

jojopalambas 2024-10-21 22:50

@ategon Ok wow. Super-thanks for the feedback, and super-congratulations for your score!

To be frank we could not beat 80, and we were seriously theorizing that 100 was impossible... And you beat that impossible score by 65! Just incredible, and I agree that going that far makes the music and the gameplay repetitive :smile:

bloodbane 2024-10-22 09:38

The idea is good but I feel like RNG isn't friendly to me. Also is the trap mushroom working? I'm surprised enemy could walk past without getting hit at all. Might need to replay this to see if I missed anything.