Foon → Ludum Dare Explorer → Users → Ellie Rasmussen
| Year | LD | Theme | Game | Division | Rank | Ov | Fu | In | Th | Gr | Au | Hu | Mo | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2023 | 52 | Harvest | Dungeon of the Dragon | jam | 3.09 | 3.09 | 3.59 | 1.68 | 3.13 | 2.72 | 2.04 | 3.18 |
Atmosphere can be tough to sell in text adventures, and you nailed it! The text itself is great to sell the effect of hunting down the crew members, but the visuals and music surrounding it takes it up a notch. I really liked having the map up in the top left corner to orient myself, but it wasn't super clear which option would lead me where.
Super cute and super fun! The fireball destroying the towers was a GREAT touch. I'd have loved to be able to kill enemies by knocking them off towers or knocking towers onto them. The breath weapon felt a bit anti-climactic in comparison to the fireball since it didn't have the physics feedback behind it - even if firebreath was technically more effective I found myself using fireball because it felt more fun. A bit more onboarding / tutorial would be nice but I know that's always tough on such a tight deadline. Overall a fantastic game!
I like the visual representation of exponential growth - it's satisfying to go from growing single plots to massive fields so fast. A more in-depth tutorial would be nice, specifically something that spells out the point of the game early on. Controls like zooming out or planting crops are hard to parse when there's little context regarding what the game is about. The plant/paste mechanic is really cool! I could easily see this expanding into a neat clicker game by combining plant/paste -> grow -> harvest into an auto-farmer.
A wonderfully innovative take on the tower defense genre! I love the idea of having to balance between leveling up individual plants and spawning new ones. An interesting quirk of the mechanic is that there's never any incentive to conserve resources - because a plant's level is determined by how long it's been on the map it's pretty much always a good idea to place plants immediately. I don't think this is necessarily bad, especially because it gets replaced by the equally (if not more) interesting decision of when to harvest plants, just something to keep in mind should you choose to continue with the idea.
I saw in another comment that the bugs going off-path in the third level was on purpose? If so, that's a wonderful mechanic that isn't communicated enough to the player. I thought that it was a bug (pun only a little bit intended) until I read your comment above stating that it was the intended behavior. I think just adding similar path assets to the other paths they can take would be plenty to tell the player that it's a feature and not a bug.
One last thing: the sensitivity on the mouse controls for moving the camera is pretty high. This wouldn't be a big deal since you can use WASD to move the camera as well, but because every other control is handled through the mouse I kept defaulting to using the mouse to control the camera. Even after discovering the WASD controls I used the mouse unconsciously because everything else in the game was handled through the mouse.
Overall, this is a genuinely fun and well-made game!