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Velhotorni (Jam Version)'s itch.io pageTeam Member Socials handles or Discord names.
jake6724., torspou, uvula_, eamc, DanTheManNW
Gameplay Demo Link
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5oEkm_vZ0c0
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Comments
Amazing game! Hands down this should be the jam winner! I just have no words to describe how good this game is. This is indeed a demo for a full game and I'd love to see the post-jam progress! Instead of thirty paragraphs worth of praise (which your team certainly deserves) I will instead throw a few friendly nitpicks I found while playing (which will not change the rating!).
I feel like the player should be able to close the messages by clicking on them, instead of having to reach the keyboard to press space. Iirc this is the only thing which needed a keyboard button. Other than that everything could be controlled via mouse.
The player should be unable to start a wave when no towers are on the ground. I did that mistake once because I thought I could buy towers mid-wave, lol. Also speaking of waves, I'd love to see a final wave indicator! I didn't know which wave was going to be last so I wasn't sure if I should keep some funds around for further towers or I can spend everything now. Also, I'd love to be able to speed up the time!
Other than that, again, I bow down to your team for this amazing game! Can't wait to see what you can come up with in the future!
Thanks so much for the feedback!
I completely agree about clicking to progress in tutorial. We went with space bar because I was afraid that players would accidentally skip dialogue, but maybe clicking a specific location could be a compromise.
I also agree with not allowing a round to start without towers, as with current mechanics there is no reason the player should ever benefit from doing this. We actually did have a fast-forward, but it was causing inconsistencies with how quickly enemies would kill towers and I couldn't get the fix done in time. I put it back in the most recent version and it will be in the next update. Wave indicator are a good idea. Thanks again for playing!
One thing you could do regarding the tutorial is just to wait a short amount of time before allowing the player to proceed to avoid accidental clicks :)
amazing omg
I won by just buying fire and nature towers, I think that made it a lot easier since it was a little hard to keep track of which towers I had changed otherwise haha
Valid strategy, and thanks so much for playing! We'll definitely need to keep balancing and updating levels based on how we want players to use the game mechanics.
I don't really like tower defense games, but I can only bow down to the quality of this submission for a game jam !
Thank you for playing :) !
How you even do something like this in a week? This game jam entry feels like demo for actual game! I can tell from game and feedback you give to other people that you're an experienced guys!
Thank you! It's a good question. :D
I have industry experience as a professional game artist while the rest of the team are super skilled and passionate hobbyists with years of transferable experience in their own professional fields. Our team was formed through Discord's team finder channel a day before the jam started. I was really fortunate to have a few people message me that they liked my art and wanted to work with me.
We also had lots of free time to put into this project. I was working really long hours and did a fair amount of self-imposed crunch to make the game look and feel as good as possible. Crunch is of course bad when it happens in a professional setting but here it was my own choice.
We picked a game engine that both programmers were familiar with (Godot) and I chose to do pixel art with a limited colour palette since it's a very cost effective medium. You can make lots of assets really fast.
Once we had a game idea we focused on building the core features first. The game was functional on Monday and looked like this.
Any complicated additional features were quickly cut for time. Like the player being able to walk around the battlefield and fight.
We'd hop on voice chat each day to share development updates and to talk about how to improve the game. You want the game to feel good to play early on so you stay motivated to develop it further. Usually it's small things you can add between larger tasks which add up to make a big difference. Enemies don't need to explode on death but it looks cool when they do. The game should have a satisfying response for any action the player does.
With the visuals we had this cool scrolling background shader for our main menu and I realized we could reuse it to create cloud cast shadows and fog effects for our levels. It transformed the game's atmosphere 1 day before the deadline. The intro cinematic went in 30 minutes before the deadline and was made in roughly the same amount of time. The team thought I was joking when I said I'd be making it, lol.
I did the coding of the main menu as I am pretty new to GODOT. We also had the time to test the game. Thank you very much for playing
The game is realy beatiful and well polish.
It was just a bit too hard for me ^^
But I had a great time.
Well done !
Thank you! We like yours
I feel like this is an advanced form of Rock Paper Scissors, and I love it :) Great polish too, I feel like this implements tower defense elements quite well! My only complaint could be that it's quite confusing to keep track of the right element for the enemies and towers, either I just suck lol or maybe the waves could be simpler. I also couldn't get past 1-6, but that's probably on me :D
Thank you! :)
The current iteration is really challenging for sure. One good strategy we discovered while testing was to space out the towers across the map into 3 chokepoints (giving yourself more time to react) and to group them by element (reducing cognitive load). There's one more level after the first one if you'd like to give it another shot.
We've thought about continuing the project beyond the jam and have talked about different ways the difficulty could be addressed. Some were planned for the jam build but didn't make the cut.