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All Power to the Turrets's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Fun | #80 | 3.727 | 3.727 |
| Overall | #136 | 3.636 | 3.636 |
| Theme | #145 | 4.000 | 4.000 |
| Sound | #158 | 3.273 | 3.273 |
| Music | #190 | 3.273 | 3.273 |
| Mechanics | #212 | 3.273 | 3.273 |
| Aesthetics | #274 | 3.364 | 3.364 |
| Story | #419 | 2.000 | 2.000 |
Ranked from 11 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
How many people worked on this game in total?
1
Did you use any existing assets? If so, list them below.
Level tile map from Kenney, Turrets from zintoki, sound effects from Pixabay
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Comments
This was a fun entry. I would have liked more agency in choosing the towers to turn on, but I liked the way you had to power up the prerequisite nodes, like a puzzle.
Yeah, more agency with the towers was something I wish I had but was constrained by the way I had designed the level early on in the jam and it was too late to change it. Thanks for the feedback!
I gave it a few attempts.
Not bad if this is your first tower defense.
It appeared that the cost of connections increased by 5 every time one was placed. The game could definitely benefit from a description on the itch page to claify this to players.
Having just one life is brutal though. And the waves appeard to just continue after I got the game over message.
Thanks for playing it, and the good feedback! I'll update the description to make it more explicit.
The cost of the towers was a deliberate thing to try to balance the game. The idea I had for the jam initially was that the power grid would only be able to hold so many towers, so there would be relays like boosters or switches that allowed the power to be diverted. The increasing cost was my compromise in the time frame so that there would actually be a challenge. But even then I worried there would be no real challenge because the tower placement is all by necessity. "What can I turn on at this moment that will help with this wave?"
It maybe was a bit too brutal for a jam though. But with one day to go I was despairing because I had all the pieces in place but there was no player agency at all. Either the player got overwhelmed or built up an overpowered defence and there was no challenge.
Balance is harder than it looks, right? I had similar concerns in my game, fearing my puzzles would be too simple.
Perhaps you could test how it felt if there were more towers to each node, and once you powered the node you'd have to select the tower you wanted to activate. Perhaps pay slightly less per node, but also pay for towers?
Overall pretty fun, but my gripe is that it feels like you have no agency in which place you build your tower. If you pick the wrong place to start or build too heavy on one side, you have no way of surviving since it's one miss and over. Still had a good time, and almost made it to the last round but instead of investing in a working turret, I bought that middle relay that doesn't actually power the middle front turret till you get the two side turrets.
Thanks for playing and giving good feedback!
That issue came down to a matter of balancing - either funds accumulated too easily and there was no challenge, or I made it so that the player had to make just-in-time upgrades with the resources to win. In that respect, it's more like a real-time puzzle game than a tower defence game.
Enjoyable tower defence game.
Even though it's a tower defense, it really plays more like a puzzle game. I could see each level acting like a new puzzle. I really like this combo.
Thanks for playing! It's cool you picked up on the puzzle aspect. It came together on the final day when I was trying to balance the game.
The idea for multiple levels with different puzzles would be a good way to extend the concept.
Nice little game. The alien routes could do with being more random, and maybe some upgrades. Congrats!
Thanks for playing!
The randomness issue is tricky. It was random initially, but it became hard to balance the game when randomness could just overwhelm one side or punish the player for the wrong build through no fault of their own. There were meant to be upgrades (switches, boosters), but they were dropped for time.