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Angus Defense's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Accessibility | #1 | 3.938 | 3.938 |
| Controls | #14 | 3.750 | 3.750 |
| Fun | #25 | 3.594 | 3.594 |
| Overall | #34 | 3.317 | 3.317 |
| Theme | #49 | 3.094 | 3.094 |
| Audio | #52 | 3.219 | 3.219 |
| Graphics | #59 | 3.281 | 3.281 |
| Originality | #109 | 2.344 | 2.344 |
Ranked from 32 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Godot Version
4.5.1
Game Description
A short resource management tower defense game.
How does your game tie into the theme?
The resources are whatever the town has on hand for the alchemist to use to create your towers, and later the monster bits you collect. We also repurposed sprites from our other games for the dialog.
Source(s)
N/A
Discord Username(s)
dragonsislesoftware_77839, awanderingsongbird_74574
Participation Level (GWJ Only)
6
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Comments
Really great game! I had a lot of fun playing it, and I didn't think it was too difficult or too easy. Adding health to the tower does seems like it can be challenged to balance it, especially if you add later stages (that may just be me though). I never tried it on mobile, but the fact that y'all considered and implemented, that is really impressive! Really awesome submission and I'd love to play it more if it gets updates in the future!
Thanks for playing and the feedback. Glad you had fun.
We are working on a small post-jam update to improve the UI a bit and do some playbalancing. We are not currently planning to develop it further, as we currently have 2 other large projects actively being developed, and another getting some updates. Eventually we will make our way back to tower defense, and either continue this one or make something new.
Amazing game!
I played it on the web and also tried it a little on my phone. It was a great experience and felt very complete for such a short development time.
I read some comments about the difficulty, and I think it’s just right: not too hard, but not too easy either, perfect for a jam game. Most importantly, the player is encouraged to explore all the possibilities the game offers.
Good job!
Thanks for playing and the feedback.
Glad it worked for you on the phone. We did not have as much time polishing the mobile experience.
We are planning to do some rebalancing and add a difficulty option for easy or normal, to accommodate those who want a greater challenge, and those who like it being on the easier side.
Wow I can’t believe you managed to build such a complete game in such short time! The amount of towers, upgrades, currencies, types of enemies, … Really amazing! Not only that, the game was a lot of fun and I liked the pacing of getting more and more towers and upgrades each round. It kept me engaged until the last wave.
I see what you’re saying in the description about the difficulty. I’m not particularly skilled in tower defense games yet I managed to easily beat the waves by stacking a lot of towers close to the entry of the enemies. At some point they almost weren’t even visible and were being defeated before being seen. Those cannon towers are OP lol. But I feel like balance is such a hard middle point to find, especially with only 9 days to develop and test. Maybe some difficulty settings could’ve helped players find their own difficulty, but that’s probably really hard to achieve in this short period of time.
Great entry, thanks!
Oh one thing I forgot to mention is kudos for giving the game touchscreen support. I was looking to play jam games while away from the computer and was pleasantly surprised that this game supported touch controls so I could just play it from my phone. The game even gave clear instructions at the beginning on how to use the touch controls. Awesome job there making the game more accessible!
With GWJ's strong push for accessibility, we try to accommodate as many input types as we can. Even our games before joining GWJ we tried to be accessible, so it was a good fit for us.
I have to admit, mobile is often the last tested, which is why I missed adding a drag and drop mode for it, and had to settle last minute for throwing in some notes about how it worked when I realized it was not intuitive. I did mange one fix for it before submissions closed. By default, as soon as you click/touch the tower in placement mode, it would place the tower. With mobile, if you tried to click on the tower to drag it from the start position, it would instead place it there, which was not ideal. It got an update to require movement before placing.
Ohh that would explain why sometimes (I think it only happened with the first tower of each type?) I’d buy the tower but would not be able to place it somewhere else, and it would end up on the bottom of the map, above the bar where you purchase/build towers. I thought it was me fat-fingering the screen and not dragging the tower properly haha, but it’s good to know it wasn’t just me. Still, it was a minor thing and with the generous resources you get I was still able to build plenty of towers where I wanted them.
All in all the mobile support felt like it was very intentional (even if less tested as you mention) and felt as a great way to experience the game.
Thanks for playing, the feedback, and the kind words.
Balancing is certainly tough. We enjoy Tower Defense games, so initially had it much harder. In prep for the jam we dropped it down, including removing alternate paths for enemies to come from, and went a little too far. I do want to work on adding difficulty settings into more of our games, but I always end up putting it off, wanting more to be in place first, and running out of time for jams. Eventually we want our jam games to have a normal difficulty for people who play that style, and an easy mode for those who don't.
I see, that’s very interesting knowing that the game was initially harder. If you’re trying to balance one difficulty for everybody, it seems sensible to me to err on the side of making the game easier. Mainly because you don’t know what type of players you’ll have, but probably many will be tower defense novices (such as myself). From my perspective I’d rather play a game a bit easy than too hard, which becomes frustrating. Especially for jam games where you want to have time to try as many games as you can.
That option of novice/expert you mention would already go a long way in making balancing easier, as well as potentially extending the play time of the game. I haven’t tried to implement those systems myself yet, but I’d imagine they’re not trivial to implement so in only 9 days it’d be hard to find a lot of time to invest in that!
Outstanding entry! I love the number of animations you have for the enemies, towers, and projectiles. The balancing was pretty good and I enjoyed the variations of the towers. Didn't really use much of the map and just crammed everything at the start which paid off when the last half of the tower unlocks were proximity boosters. A heads up of the wave would be nice to help plan before. With that then enemies could have required damage like "must be slowed to take damage" or "immune to fire". Really well executed tower defense and I see a few comments saying otherwise but I really like the variation of resources. It had me looking through the towers and upgrade tabs to make sure I was doing everything. Oh and nice "Mac" Gyver reference at the start. Awesome :)
Thanks for playing and the feedback. Glad to see some people getting the reference!
With the current waves, yeah, cramming everything at the start is a good strategy. We are doing some rebalancing, including additional entry points, that will add a bit more strategy and challenge.
I like the idea of adding info on the coming waves, beyond just for the boss on the last wave. We already had a comment about being frustrated by the long range firing enemies, so were thinking about something for them, but maybe we update the text for each wave to mention any new enemies in that wave.
It was a lot of fun and turned out to be a very good tower defense game. The graphics look good and there are lots of features built in to keep the game from becoming monotonous.
I think there are too many resources for this game (if it were bigger, it would probably make more sense).
And unfortunately, I didn't think the theme was quite right for the jam theme. (Maybe I didn't understand it :D ) But I definitely had fun and it turned out really nice :)
Thanks for playing and the feedback.
The number of resources were due to the theme. They were meant to represent all the random junk from around town that was being used to create the towers and upgrades. We had planned to expand on it by including some crafting elements where you actually used them to either build the towers, or research them, but none of what we came up with, that we could do during the jam, felt like it would make the game better. It felt like shoehorning in the crafting and would slow down/interrupt the gameplay, making it less fun overall by trying to force the theme in. In the end, we favored making a more fun game and went with typical tower defense gameplay, with the theme being mainly in the setting, story, and types of resources used. For us, making the game more fun was a higher priority than a high theme score.
The menu is very indepth sadly it isn't accessible while ingame :(.
Things I liked:
Critiques:
Thanks for playing and the feedback.
We need to revisit our settings screen. Not all of them are designed in a way that works while the game is active. We've had enough comments asking about it in various jams that we need to make changes so more of them are available from pause. We added the Game Speed slider to the pause screen on one of our other games, and liked it so much that it is now something we plan to do for any game where it doesn't break the gameplay.
One of the shooting enemies has a longer range than most towers. You need to use the longer range towers, such as the starting catapult, to deal with them. We will see if we can better convey this to the player.
We need to rebalance everything, and make upgrading feel more worth the cost.
We had plans for the resources that didn't make it in, so the current number is excessive for the gameplay. I also wanted to add some UI elements to help with them that did not make it in in time. In the post-jam update you will only start to see new resources once you have some of them. We also plan to do some highlighting to draw the eye to the right resources when placing a tower.
The Shield Tower takes the damage instead of any protected towers, as long as the shield is active. Once it takes enough damage the shield goes down, but it also regenerates over time. Repair Towers repair/heal other towers in range that have already been damaged. One is preventative, while the other is reactive.
Thank you for your response! Looking forward to the update!
13 types of resources? Damn, I thought I will have the most with 11, lol. :D
And you actually managed to implement the upgades.
The gameplay is a bit repetetive after a while, but as a showcase of the core systems it is enough.
And sadly it's not much of a challenge. Keeping all your towers up to date with stacking all available upgrades, bonuses and boost towers will cause the enemies being vaporized before they even get to the first curve. Even the last wave.
This could be solved by multiple entry points forcing you to divide your forces strategically or create set building spots where the towers can be placed, so you are forced to consider different ranges and qualities of the towers to decide where to build what.
And one last note, gathering resources automatically like this feels very uneventful. You could let the player gather the drops by clicking on them, Plants vs. Zombies style. As there's not much to do for the player during the wave itself, this would at least keep them busy during the show. :)
We thought about requiring clicking to collect, but didn't get to it. If we took this one further, in addition to increasing the difficulty, we would probably add click to collect, and a tower that could be placed to auto-collect. We want to balance the difficulty so that you feel like you need to be placing or upgrading towers during the wave.
Thanks for all your thought on this.
We did have multiple entry points in the original map, but dropped it to one to simplify the game for non-TD players in the jam. In a full TD we would have it.
Thanks for playing and the feedback.
We had wanted to add some additional crafting elements with the various resources, but the ideas didn't work out into anything fun. We scrapped the crafting, but never got around to reducing the resources further. Originally there were more and we already had a pass at reducing the number.
Yeah, our last rebalance dropped the difficulty too much. We are trying to find the right balance of challenge and complexity for a jam submission, and favored too easy.
Yea, I totally get the idea, but compromising the vision with reach rarely works. Identity of the game takes priority almost every time. A game that tries to be for everyone ends up to being for no one. But what do I know? You have more ratings than me, so maybe your approach DOES work... :)
I agree that you shouldn't try to make the perfect game for everyone, but for a jam it does help to favor a being a bit easier/more accessible, to allow more people to be able to at least play the first few minutes to rate. We start by making the game we want, then try to find a good balance of difficulty. We often fail and end up too easy, but after the jam we can always continue working on it. For us, the jams are all about the feedback, and experimenting with things we might not otherwise get to do. Ratings are nice, but we often find there are a few really good comments that are worth more than everything else in helping us make better games.
As for the number of ratings, wow this jam has been great for us. We normally don't get close to 20 ratings in a GWJ until the end of the week, and go rate more games in hopes of staying above the median. This jam has been far more active early on than we recall any of the previous ones we've been in. I don't know how Itch's system works, but I do think that your past activity may have something to do with how you are positioned in the default listings. We've done several GWJs now and a number of other jams, and we are very active in rating and commenting in them, so I think that has helped a lot compared to our first where we were wondering what we were doing wrong, but had not accumulated any of what I will call global karma. This is just my guess, mind you. Also, there is a bit of "karma" in doing the same jam multiple times and having other jammers recognize you and want to play your games. We also play, rate, and comment on as many games as we can. Good comments on their submission can do a lot to encourage some people play your game. For GWJ our normal goal is to do at least 40 before switching to only reciprocating for those who rate and comment on ours. It also helps to play a bunch the first day or two so people have time to fit playing your game into their schedule. After the first day, you may want to sort by Karma, and play the higher rated ones, as those are the people actively rating other games. Still, we only expect about half of the ones we rate to reciprocate, based on past experience.
I think that making a tower defence in a Game Jam is a massive feat and making it feel fun is even more impressive. I don't have too many critiques, although I did feel the number of resources might have been a few too many and could have done with some simplifying.
Thanks for playing. the feedback, and the kind words.
We had fun making it. And yeah, the resources were meant for things we didn't get to implement, and should have been trimmed again before the jam.
Ended up stacking all my towers on the left side and upgrading them hard early on – surprisingly effective 😄
One of those games where you completely lose track of time, and then feel genuinely sad when there are no more levels. As a TD veteran, this was great fun. Maybe almost a bit too easy, but that’s honestly the only critique I can think of. And as a fellow gamedev: huge respect. What you pulled off within a single week is seriously inspiring. The look, the feel, the audio, weird tower ideas - and that hilarious MacGyver reference.
Thanks for playing and the feedback.
Glad you enjoyed. We like TD games and plan to do more of them in the future, once we finish up our current projects.
We knew from the start we wanted to reference MacGyver, but not too directly, so tried to have some fun with it. Sure, most people don't know his first name, and may miss some of the references, but it was fun for us, and a bit of an Easter egg for those who do get it.
This game is super fun!!! I really enjoyed trying to figure out the best places and what to upgrade. While playing I was pretty hooked. I feel like I could easily sink hours into this game if it was longer. Really well done, and cool take on the theme!
Thanks for playing and the feedback. Glad you enjoyed! We aren't, currently, planning to develop this one further, beyond a minor post-jam update, but will be doing other tower defense games in the future, using feedback from this one to make it better.
You have a great amount of content with distinct towers. I like the narration especially how each tower is introduced. And I appreciate the variety of the supported inputs (+1 for keyboard only).
The game is easy, I placed a lot of towers on the left and it worked well. Also, there could be a way to see upgrades on towers without needing to click on them, like a popup displayed when you hover over them.
Overall, a solid submission!
Thanks for playing and the feedback.
Wild Jam has been our main jam, and with the heavy push for accessibility, we have tried to accommodate all inputs when we can.
The game is definitely easy. We will rebalance it after the jam. Swarming the entry is a good strategy currently, though we will probably add some swarms that make spreading out more important.
Showing the tower details on hover would be a good idea. We don't plan to do much with this game after the jam, but may fit that into our post jam update.
The controls screen and game speed setting are reeeaally nice features. I did not expect the alchemist to be a dragon, fun surprise. I liked the variety in turrets, not just different stats but different uses.
Thanks for playing and the feedback.
Cool submission! I like tower defence games, I found it a little easy as I had so many resources and everything died instantly too even without doing many upgrades, but still pretty fun
Thanks for playing and the feedback. We agree it ended up too easy, especially for people who normally play TD.
I only wish there was a way for me to continue playing after wave 20! I ended up scoring 12,622 points. Awesome submission!
Thanks for playing. Glad you enjoyed it enough to want more! We don't plan to continue working on this one at the moment, though more TD games are in our plans for the future, as we enjoy playing them.
You made a wide tower selection where all have somethings unics. The upgrade where great too. Having so many resource i didn’t really bother to track anythings and it’s probably a bit too much for a tower defense but still not a huge problem. I also didn’t feel the need of the health on tower. Well may be because i got the tower that heal my other one but almost no tower got injured.
Thanks for playing and the feedback.
The many resources were part of planned features that didn't work out, and do feel excessive for the simple game we created. If we work on this further, they will be refined.
I agree that I never used the health upgrades, but some of our team did like them. We tried to accommodate many play styles. If we rework the difficulty, it may become more useful, especially before the healing tower is available.
Yeah i agree, on the long run it will be an awesome feature.
This game was really fun to play through and the narrator / the overall story was great! The resources were a bit much, you could probably condense it into 2-3 resources but just a minor thing. Also it was a bit easy but that's probably good for a game jam. Loved it!
Thanks for playing and the feedback.
Yeah, we overdid the resources, but it was part of our additional plans for the theme that didn't fully work out. We agree on being too easy.
This was a cool tower defense game! Here's my final screen:
Here's what I liked:
I think adding some more sound effects e.g. to the menus could help. Also I think the number of resources was a little overwhelming to keep track of. Maybe having them unlock as you play through the levels could help fix this
Thanks for playing and the feedback.
I will agree that it is too easy, even for a jam game. The later waves should have ramped up the difficulty more, leaving the early ones for learning. Still, good work not taking any damage.
In a full game we'd advance to the next fight, possibly a new map, after the boss, but for the jam we wanted to keep it short. The stats seemed like a good end. After doing a few Wild Jams we started learning to do more accessibility features and now try to add as many as we can reasonably fit into the current jam game. They often also help with testing, and may even have started out as testing tools. Letting people pick how they like to play is something we try to focus on as we develop. Each member of our team has different play styles, and we enjoy seeing how each other plays the games we make. That helps us design in a way more open to letting plays have more freedom.
We were trying to add other features, that ultimately didn't work out, and didn't start adding audio until late. It could have used with a bit more attention.
I agree with you that the resources should be revealed as you progress/collect them, rather than all at once. It was considered, but we never quite found the time.
I like how you comprimed the whole "campaign" to one map. It is fun to discover new tower types every second wave, they felt unique which is great.
Dragon narrator is cool and he helped me to be dragged (no pun intended) in the story while providing useful info about unlocked stuff.
I've found both music and art very pleasing.
For the resources - sometimes less is more. In this case I felt pretty overwhelmed by the amount of different resources. There was also little feedback on what I have earned, so at the end I just didn't care, because usually I have had enough to build what I wanted.
The difficulty is on the easy side, which is fine for the game jam, but for the full game I would personally preffer more challange.
Enemies that were shooting at me were a little annoying as the only tower in range of them was catapult and as they stayed in the back, they were targeted as last, so meanwhile they destroyed a lot of my towers and I was shouting on my catapults: "Just shoot those guys first!".
Overall very good game. I had fun playing it.
Thanks for playing and the feedback.
The varied resources was due to the theme and our intent do include more of a crafting element, that never worked out. We had lots of ideas for what we wanted, but were not happy with attempts to implement them, so fell back to basic tower defense, but with a lot of resources that ended up being mostly flavor text and setting.
If we did a full game we would increase the difficulty, and add difficulty settings. Even for a jam game, this was easier than we intended. One change we'd make is that we originally had paths at the top and bottom where later waves would come from, and we'd add those back. We cut them for the jam to simplify for those who don't normally play TD games.
Right now the towers all target the enemies closest to the end. If we built this out we'd allow you to set the targeting per tower, so you could have some catapults aiming for those hiding in the back, or perhaps by some other stat. It would mainly just be a UI change to add it. Given another day to work on this we probably would have included it.
This was a creative interpretation of the theme. The mechanics and gameplay were solid. The music had a really nice driving beat to it to keep the adrenaline pumping.
The number of resources to spend felt a bit overwhelming. Instead of making strategic decisions, I just kinda spent money on whatever I could until I ran out. I tried to use an XBox controller, but after a while I just gave up and used a Mouse. As much as I like controller support, whatever was going on was just too complex for it. I couldn't figure out how to upgrade until I used a mouse. I made it to wave 14 before I got bored. It felt like none of my choices mattered. Also, it was unclear which end the monsters were coming from until I started the game, so I built all my defenses backwards.
Really solid gameplay. Good game play loop. Good music. Everything with a mouse worked well. Nice game.
Thanks for playing and the feedback.
We had more planned for the resources, but ran out of time, and some of them just didn't work out. We will need to revisit them and try to make them feel more important and more connected to their towers/upgrades.
For the controllers and keyboard we added a cursor you can move to select towers similar to using a mouse. You have to toggle it on when you want to use it by pressing T on the keyboard or RB on an XBox controller. Then you can move it like you do when placing the towers. Press E on keyboard or X on an XBox controller to select the tower. I wanted to add a tutorial for it, but didn't quite get to it. I'll add some notes to the game page for now.
I can see your point on the layout. We are used to a left to right progression, but really should have put the town on the map so you knew where to protect.
Great submission! I tried upgrading my towers in the beginning of my run but they kept getting destroyed by the red guys so I moved on to the strategy of spamming towers everywhere, and this worked quite well. (and then I unlocked more towers that helped with defeating/ignoring the red guys). The red guys could even kill my towers from off the screen! I wish there was more of an indicator to the player about which towers they can afford to build.
Thanks for playing and the feedback.
You need to use a longer ranged tower, such as the starting catapults, to deal with the red guys. Putting some of them near other towers, especially the shorter ranged ones, can help. The catapults also get range upgrades, which help to deal with the threat from further away.
We did acknowledge them attacking from off screen and tried adjusting the map so you couldn't put your towers too close, but they have long enough range it can still happen. If we develop further, we will rework the map and their range to try to force them onto the screen before they start to fire.
I wanted to highlight the related resources when a tower is selected, and show the number in red when lacking, but ran out of time.