Play game
The King and his Spleen's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| How it looks | #13 | 3.369 | 3.483 |
| Fun to play | #15 | 2.768 | 2.862 |
| How well the theme was used | #15 | 2.768 | 2.862 |
| Educational value | #16 | 1.834 | 1.897 |
| How it sounds | #20 | 2.568 | 2.655 |
| Innovation | #20 | 2.368 | 2.448 |
Ranked from 29 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Leave a comment
Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.
Comments
It took me a while to figure out how to play but once I got it it got fun. It was relaxing in a way. I just wish with time it would go a bit faster with the spawning. I do think it was a unique way to make tower defense games by making it part of the body. Great job.
Thanks for playing and for the kind words! The slow spawning is the bug mentioned in the first note in the game description, there's a workaround described there as well, but yeah I'll update the build with the fix when the ratings are over.
I really, really liked the rendering of the background you spent time on! It's very pleasant. I enjoyed the calming music as well, and I learned what a spleen is in English, so for me it has educational value!
Thank you so much, I'm glad you enjoyed it!
Great work! This definitely could have benefitted from faster spawn rate or some information on the current\next wave, at first I thought I was playing it wrong but then realized I wasn't quick enough to place a tower which messed up the timing of the waves. I love the idea of a tower defense game taking place inside a king! You can show the consequences of your success\failure on the kingdom and do all kinds of fun stuff with it!
Yeah unfortunately I broke the spawn rate in the last hour of the jam, thanks for giving it a shot, and I love the idea of some narrative that revolves around how well you do inside the king! :D
This is a pretty solid tower defence game. I'd definitely love to see it developed further
Thanks so much! Thinking about more!
I at least plan to fix the main bugs after the voting is over though.
Loved it! I am a fan of Tower defence games and this was a lot of fun!
Thanks a lot, glad you enjoyed it!
Chicken Dinner, absolute contender game. small bug where the yellow tower got stuck to my cursor the hwole game
Thank you very much! Sorry for the bugs :D
very cool game idea!!
I do like tower defense games. This is such a cool idea for setting. The only problem with this game was there wasn't enough of it :) It was over too soon, I want more :) Would love to see this developed more. Played this one till the end. Very well put together, the movement of the bloods cells was very nice indeed. Could use the old film Fantastic Voyage for some ideas, a little ship would be fun. Great game.
I'm happy you enjoyed it, thanks for playing and for the nice comment! I'm thinking about expanding on the theme and ideas! :)
What a great idea for the tower defense genre. The visuals are great and remind me of the old Fantastic Voyage movie. It really does have the feel of a spleen and blood running through it. I would love to have more levels to play as I completed the game quite easily. One of my top games of the jam so far.
Thank you so much, I'm really glad you enjoyed it!
It works for me (Brave)
Not sure if I was getting hit by the slow spawn bug. I made a few attempts at playing but no enemies ever appeared regardless of whether I placed the tower quickly or slowly.
Not going to rate since I wasn't able to actually play the game
Ah that's odd, sorry about that! I think both buying and placing need to be quick after the page loads for the workaround to work (ideally within 1-2 seconds), but you probably already tried that. In any case, thanks so much for trying and good luck with the jam!
I feel like this would have benefited a LOT from some story/tutorial or other directions in the game itself. The music is hauntingly good and I could play it on a loop all day long though. Also, the spawn rate could use some boosting. By the time the enemies started showing up with any frequency I already had more towers than I knew what to do with them.
EDIT: Turns out I had the slow spawning bug without realizing it. A refresh tweaked the difficulty settings quite a bit :D
This looks like it has a TON of potential but you just ran out of time to hit the marks with some of the criteria in the theme and educational value. I'm excited to revisit if you keep going with it.
Thanks for the nice comment and feedback! Yeah I feel the same, it's very close to an okay experience, I caused the spawning bug in the last hour, and I wanted to make the unlock system clearer visually in the game. I did have a bunch of thematic text in mind too but I decided to try text-less for some reason. But yeah I think there's good potential in the whole concept!
Also, I will say that at least 2 people have said that they looked up what the spleen does after seeing the game :P
Game does not work for me :( Tried on Brave and Firefox. Hints did not help - no blinking red spot I could find. No sound, no movement...
Sorry about that! Thanks for trying, wish I knew what to suggest, it sounds like a bug. I'll try to debug and fix this in the future. I might be using up too much VRAM, there are only a few textures but they're on the large side due to how I'm (pre)rendering the space.
If that helps in any way - I am using Linux and play on AMD integrated GPU.
I appreciate it! I'm guessing I'm going past some allocation limit. I'll try to reduce the texture using in a future version!
Game didn’t work on firefox but did on chrome. The game was cool looking! Was a bit simple and easy to win but the viusal and idea’s was nice
Sorry for the trouble with Firefox, and thanks for playing and for the nice comment!
I'm impressed you didn't really use a game engine and chose threejs to do this in. I am a sucker for tower defense games so I was intrigued. Without reading the description it was really hard to figure out how to unlock other towers. Maybe a small tutorial in the game? For a one man crew and using the tools you did I think you should be proud of yourself.
Thank you so much! Yeah I took on quite a lot to get the visuals as they are -- the background is pre-rendered (you can easily hide it with css) but then lit/shadowed dynamically as though it's part of the world (I'm enjoying threejs's TSL). So that involved also pre-rendering normals and depth images, as well as an image to uniquely identify the cells, to be able to place towers, and then all the code to hook that up and iteration on failure due to color space and other conversion problems. I also export the blood vessel curve's tangent and normals everywhere, to pre-calculate what the velocity should be on a grid ahead of time, that way I can apply that to thousands of these particles every frame. I'm definitely happy I released something functional considering the scope I made for myself, but yeah I also need to be better at sizing such things haha. Just a couple more hours of polish and this could have turned out way better I think. I'll probably release a small update after the jam is over. I appreciate the comment!
No title, UI, or anything telling me what to do is a little difficult for a jam entry. However, the music choice was calming and clicking around allowed me to figure out what was happening. I have no idea what any of the stuff is doing, but I don't think anything got through, so that's good! I think this has some potential as a tower defense, but feels more like a proof of concept right now. Thanks for your entry!
Thanks! Yeah combining TD with light puzzle/mystery elements maybe wasn't the best idea. :D I thought people would enjoy figuring things out, but I guess not! Also, things are definitely more vague than originally intended (e.g. I wanted the yellow towers, that slow enemies and slightly damage them, to have a simple visual effect). I had hoped to have a little polish time at the end but I didn't. I just updated the game's page with an explicit explanation of it all, for people who are stuck or curious.
I seem to be having similar issues to others. I cannot seem to get the game to play at all. It will load but no enemies or tower placement allowed.
If you find out a way to play it in Chrome / Edge let me know and I will come back to rate
Sorry for the trouble. I just updated the game's page settings (the itchio "Edit Game" page), and I resized the game which should help on lower resolution screens and lower power computers, but also potentially the shop was off-screen for some folks? I also added a very detailed explanation in the game description for how everything works (see "NOTE 2"). I hope that works out, otherwise sorry again. I did test an old intel Mac computer and it was fine as well as my PC with Chrome / Edge, so not sure why it may not work for you. Thank you for trying!
Managed to get it working in OperaGX ! Very random. Might be worth sharing if others have issues. Love the music and the tower defence mechincs are cool. Had a alot of fun spawning as many towers as possible! Well done. Im glad I could get around to playing it
Woo, glad it worked and that you enjoyed it!! Very random indeed that OperaGX works of all browsers, I haven't even tested it there hah! Thanks for playing and for the nice comment! :)
You mentioned on disc that you'd be interested in giving it another go if there was a new version. There is now! Mostly fixes and polish, but also added a couple of final enemy types towards the end that were very close to fully implemented at submission time.
Looks great, I don't know how it works, clicking everywhere on everything and pressing every key didn't do anything,
but I found a console command or something with / key. I only have Firefox, so maybe it's the browser.
Ah, sorry it didn't work. I tested Firefox after reading this, and it worked correctly.
That said, I just updated the game's page settings (the itchio "Edit Game" page), and I resized the game which should help on lower resolution screens and lower power computers. I also added a very detailed explanation in the game description for how everything works (see "NOTE 2"). I hope that works out, otherwise sorry again. I did test an old intel Mac computer and it was fine as well, so not sure why it may not work.
I gave another go, I cliked all the spheres on the last try, single click, double click, click and drag, finding the center to click... I tried on browser window and full screen and still the sphere wasn't clicking.
Maybe the window resizing causes the collision shape to relocate from UI grid? I full screened it at the other resolution before it was changed but I didn't test on the resolution it was at originally...
Edit:
Maybe it's an Itch mouse issue, as on this zommed in screenshot, what seems to be the center of the light is atop the sphere but visually, my mouse is approx. where I've circled. My game also has mouse issues...
I've also clicked around using the center of light instead of my mouse and still couldn't do anything :\
So strange, sorry about that! I definitely have code to handle window resizing and didn't run into any issues with that, though of course maybe there's a bug with my code that I didn't catch. Note that only the first sphere on the left (the red sphere that has a visibly blinking light, above the number 10) can be purchased at the start. At the start of the game, clicking the other spheres does nothing even when everything is working correctly. If you feel like trying again, I can only suggest trying another browser if you have one already or feel like downloading one. Someone who had issues mentioned that OperaGX worked for them, of all browsers. No worries if you don't feel like it 😅
Nice! Very neat movement on all the particles and lights. Also liked the discovery that the "bullets" being fired could be cleaned up by using the later tower. Cool idea as well, could have different levels configs as different areas of the body. Shame about the bugs but, it's a jam game - that's expected. Nice work, you did well!
Thanks so much! Yeah I'm often too ambitious (for my abilities) with my projects and ideas! :D Thanks for playing and for the kind words!
I won the game whoo hoooo :) Looks cool its playable, but a bit to easy. Also it wasn’t sure that you couldn’t build the other towers. I thought it was buggy or not implemented yet. So an improvement would be cool that these aren’t there and spawns when you actually can place or so. The enemies was like said a bit too easy but balancing is a hard thing especially in a Jam so good job!
Yeah, I wanted to add 2 floating dots above the red tower, and fill them when purchased which unlocks the yellow tower, and shows the 2 floating dots above them now. Yeah also hiding the later ones at the start would have been a good way to help as well! I wanted to show the player what they can unlock so they look forward to more, but I agree the whole thing in general is too vague right now.