FoonLudum Dare ExplorerLD57 → Break The Tower

Break The Tower

By torcado

View on ldjam.com

CategoryRankScoreCount
Overall404.2252
Fun374.1952
Innovation1013.9352
Theme5483.4852
Graphics3943.7752
Audio1973.7450
Humor1703.5546
Mood3623.6850

Comments

slimetrash 2025-04-08 02:36

wow! at first i was already impressed, very fun learn to fly-esque game but with a stronger skill component. I don't want to spoil it for other people but damn! there's so much here, really really cool, still exploring

update: is this good

break_the_tower.png

mikan 2025-04-08 04:33

This is really cool, completely beyond my imagination.

EDIT: When the speed is particularly fast, some stucking bugs often occur. Such as quickly passing through two floors with more speed and bomb. And when I break the bottom glass, the game also gets stuck

hunter-van-brocklin 2025-04-08 05:44

wow, what a delightful game! initially everything feels so slippery but it's all so oddly satisfying - all the better when you've bought enough stuff to press onward and actually see where it goes... this game pays dividends! it's a treat. reminds me of playing flash games on school computers 20-something years ago because some kid knew a link to a cool site that wasn't blocked. i can only imagine how this would go over once somebody got far enough. : )

edit: oh, i did get a couple of glitches - mostly momentary graphical ones which was fine, but a few times if i was holding dash and starting to charge it up while slowly sliding into the "kill zone", i would get stuck in this super-slow momentum speed fall all the way to the bottom.

donutshoes 2025-04-08 06:48

fantastic as always, I need to give it another try, it was taking me quite a bit of time to reach floor 3, maybe I can strategize my purchases better :thinking:

torcado 2025-04-08 06:55

Thanks everyone :) Hopefully the speed related/stuck bugs should be fixed, sorry about that!

kaliuresis 2025-04-08 06:59

Incredible! I'm impressed with the scope you managed to pull off during a jam. The end game had a few soft-locks where the ball would get stuck until I reset when moving up through layers too fast or I would get stuck with antigravity permanently on after dying, but aside from that it was a lot of fun and very well polished considering how big the game is. I'm curious what your original concept was and how much was added on or cut from your initial plan.

torcado 2025-04-08 07:24

@kaliuresis thanks! this is interesting to me, funny enough i actually wrote about this in the big message that gets cut off. For one reason or another i'm obsessed with the idea of hiding things in games, so the extra content was something i definitely wanted to do from the start. In trying to make good time management decisions I didn't have anything besides the base done by the end of day 2, so I had a sort of ultimatum decision moment at that point regarding whether I thought I could improve the game by more than 50% (by whatever metric that means to me) if i took another day to add the extra stuff. I realized I cared more about that than the base game itself, and thought I would just be wasting the potential by not doing so, so here we are. Nothing was really cut, but I could've expanded on it more or less indefinitely given the time.

fusionnist 2025-04-08 15:58

Had me going "WOW" out loud a few times! Found the little bird, too :) I think you did it again! This is just awesome!

yorsh 2025-04-09 00:51

Really cool one! Maybe it's a bit slow to uncover stuff (or I'm just bad), but it has depths, that's for sure. It feels really great to play, with a lot of attention to details. Congrats!

npckc 2025-04-09 00:59

i really enjoyed going through this! at first i was an idiot and didn't realise you had to hold left-click and not just press it to actually move the ball but after i got that it was incredibly fun to go up!

placeholders 2025-04-09 05:54

damn, another Torcado's hit! such a clever game- i loved every aspect of it. the art is simple but with so much feel to it and its just works. the game design is a spark of addictive genius. really top notch entry here! loved it 5 stars!

verttixpertti 2025-04-09 16:05

Escaping from the first tower was crazy. Fun game

ruslana 2025-04-10 13:09

Loved satisfying sounds, simple but cute art/ui/animations. Progression tree is cool. This game requires some skill but on the other hands it adds to preciousness of upgrades :)

borabee 2025-04-10 17:34

Wow! Incredible how much you were able to do in such a short time! I love games with twists and this game just kept turning up with more. I was not expeting them at the start and they really blew me away. The simple mechanic of the game was challenging but still fun to play, with each new skill acquired really contributing to the experience. I find the ending quite ironic and fitting with the theme, given that [spoilers] the whole time we were trying to climb higher and the answer was right below us (in the depths lol). Amazing work!

I also made a game about a ball (egg) with dash power for this jam! However, our ball (egg) dashes downwards haha

xivo 2025-04-10 20:34

This game is absolute cinema. Graphics (the visual effects are pretty good and satisfying), audio, game design, the big twist, you nailed it. One thing I would say is that the coin per bounce power-up is pretty broken, I started farming coins with it and not playing the game lol. Excelent entry!

silkworm-sweatshop 2025-04-10 23:54

This is how you add depth to breakout, you madman. Spent way too much time on this, even spending probably 5 minutes just climbing the outside of the tower seeing if it would ever end. Were almost about to quit when the final solution really was pretty simple. Super polished presentation as usual.

t-c 2025-04-11 03:43

I like checking out all the games you submit. I feel they're super well made and polished. I see that there's a lot here, but I felt like the upgrade system and the gameplay in the very beginning held me back from enjoying this one and exploring it in full. It felt like I was playing a very basic version of breakout for a good 20 minutes with no sign of anything interesting happening. The pace of the beginning was too slow, and killed my motivation to actually explore all the cool stuff I know is in the game. Still as always great work, and look forward to the next one.

eyedromeda 2025-04-11 20:06

Very interesting concept, and I figure there's more to it, but I had to give up after struggling for 20 minutes to consistenly make it past the first set of blocks. I think the game is somewhat held back by the difficulty. I saw a cave, but there wasn't much to explore there with the upgrades I had at least, and it took a bit too long to get said updates with my skill level being what it is, I guess. Very cool stuff though, I see a lot of effort put in!

skosnowich 2025-04-12 07:02

You had me intrigued as soon as the block below the paddle showed cracks. After breaking that, I wanted to find out if there is a top in the tower, but didn't make it there if there is one (even after the other secrets). I think it would've been nice if you added some sort of achievements in the game and showed how many there are after you broke the block in the first tower, so that the player knows that there is more to the game. I honestly only left the first tower by coincidence and nearly closed the game without seeing the world, because I didn't expect that there are secrets.

I agree to other comments here that the beginning of the game felt quite hard, the paddle movement was just too slow and floaty and nearly made me quit the game even with the upgrades in sight (which at the start didn't make the paddle viable as well), but I am glad that I stayed.

klinsmannhengles 2025-04-14 21:40

It starts simple and then there is a lot of secrets and everything. It remembers me about Super Mario World with this kind of thing. There's no much to talk about, it's one of the best i'have played on this jam: ABSOLUTE CINEMA. Great work!

acarr 2025-04-14 22:25

Superb game! Like a few other people have said, there's a lot more to do than you think if you look hard enough. Was constantly impressed with how much there was underneath the surface on top of an already polished game.

xpoho 2025-04-16 07:40

изображение_2025-04-16_143637567.png

It is definitely 5 stars for fun! I very-very-very like your game! It's so adventurous, so many secrets! I love this type of the games! ^_^

But, tbh, bomb upgrade makes it more difficult to play, because moneymaking started to be so slow...

Anyway, great game!

tetraminose 2025-04-17 11:10

That was actually a surprising good twist! The way you handled both the discovery, exploration and different upgrades depending on what zones you manage to find gives such a nice sensation of wonder. The scaling too I think is almost perfect, with really nice ups and downs until you genuinely start destroying the score and basically are able to buy everything and just sit back and enjoy seeing the numbers get comically big.

Overall this is just fantastic, played it and finished the game in just one go :)

teto 2025-04-25 15:18

Right, just taking a short break from the last 2hrs of being addicted to this then I'm sure I'll be playing for another 2hrs I'm sure. Your games every jam are my favourite and I have to apologise profusely for the fleeting thought in the first 10 minutes that maybe this one wasn't as good as previous games but that very quickly disappeared as soon as I broke free and realised you'd made yet another amazing game!

The exploration aspect really adds another layer to it making the progress less linear and interesting with the different currency types. I'm going back and forth between places when I get to a point when I realise I need an upgrade from a different tower. I love all the little hidden characters too (snoozing cat is my fave) and fun message.

As always, looks really polished with loads of great visual and audio feedback from everything that happens which. Sounds are varied and don't get repetitively boring. The graphics and simple and clean and everything ties together really nicely.

My only suggestion would be to have the ability to zoom out in the upgrade menu (which I'm sure would have been on a to do list had you more time!). The upgrade system got real silly real quick and, as much as I loved the sheer amount of content, it was difficult to navigate quickly and see what I wanted to do next. The interactive web was a really nice touch though!

ciaranw 2025-04-25 16:11

Fantastic jam game - absolutely loads of content which was really fun to explore (lots of depth ;)). I managed to unlock every upgrade in the end, and had a great time exploring all the features. You have a knack for making really engaging games out of a simple polished 'hook' - great job!

jefvel 2025-04-26 00:23

Waow, super well designed game! It just keeps giving and evolving! Managed to get all upgrades (I think) and found the guys. Answers the question what breakout would be if it actually was breakout. I like that the upgrades change the way you play the game, starting with playing carefully, then bouncing the ball to shoot lasers, and finally just slamming through everything. Really impressive how much stuff you managed to put into it!

Nice work!