Building a tower-defense game as an actual Game Boy Advance ROM was immediately interesting to me. I downloaded an emulator specifically to play it, and the presentation really does feel like something built for that hardware.
The music and sound effects especially fit that era well.
I also liked the day/night structure. Having the daytime to place and upgrade defenses and then starting the nighttime parade makes the theme part of the actual game loop. âIt only comes out at nightâ is doing mechanical work here rather than just describing the setting.
I played two fairly long runs, and my best was around Night 6 of 10. Itâs definitely challenging, but I think the bigger difficulty for me was understanding enough of what was happening to improve my strategy between attempts.
There were enemies whose behavior I couldnât quite read.
In particular, I encountered one that appeared to have no health remaining but continued moving down the path while my defenses kept attacking it. I couldnât tell whether it was bugged, had some special ability, or was intentionally acting as a decoy.
If that is a special enemy behavior, some visual feedback would help distinguish it immediately.
That became more important because of the size of the map. I like the idea of defending something larger than a single screen, but on the GBA-sized viewport I could only see small portions of the defense at once. Moving around the map also happens in fairly noticeable screen shifts, so I often felt like I was checking disconnected snapshots rather than monitoring one battle.
Because of that, I sometimes knew that my defense was failing without really understanding where or why it had started failing.
A little more global information could help.
Even something simple like indicators at the edges of the screen showing where enemies are getting close to the pumpkins, where a lane is leaking, or where a special enemy is currently located could preserve the large battlefield without requiring the player to see all of it simultaneously.
I also struggled to understand the full tower system during play. I mostly felt like I was placing variations of the same defense and trying to find better positions. If there are different tower types or evolution paths with different roles, making those distinctions more obvious in the UI would give me more to strategize around.
The core idea is solid, and getting a functioning tower-defense game onto GBA hardware during a jam is a cool technical accomplishment.
For me, the biggest opportunity is making the information required to make good strategic decisions as readable as the underlying systems.