itch.io

Good job in such a short time. It looked good and felt like a really short demo.

The core loop is fun, and kind of hybrid between incremental and arcade action. I think this has potential for further development.

However it was bit clear what I was supposed to do, and was there any else victory than just eventually dying and losing half metal. I tried to kill all enemies, but their spawning seemed to just continue. It was at least somewhat unclear for that part.

Thanks for feedback!

Kingdom Rush and Radiant Defense were inspirations for this!

It was a deliberate design choice to have pre-selected locations, so that when you build more turrets, you have to put them in worse and worse places, which incentivizes upgrading turrets instead. So you have to balance between that.

There is a research upgrade (last in the first research row) that lets you place one turret slot in almost any place you want. So you get to decide for one!


I also stress-tested my data pipeline with this project. I had created a small a program where I could quickly do game data and visuals for turrets, enemies, and effects by hand. I did not count the creation of the data editor for the 6 hours I spent, as it is "tooling".

Thanks!

I tried that some of the basic towers (like the point defense you have at the start) would create "rhythm" in their typical deployment, like percussion for the soundtrack as they attack the enemies.

Thanks for the feedback!

The difficulty starts to ramp up around levels 5-6, it might indeed be too steep (too trivial before, quite hard after).

All visible things will be made by humans only. It is mostly the engine wiring that is agentically assisted. I will flag the game as "AI-assisted: code" because it contains engine code that is made with agents, but the game itself will be human-made.

Hi

I have built my own custom engine that I have been developing for last half year. I have used AI agentic assistance when building it (long before this jam).

Question: Is it okay to participate in this jam if the code for the game itself is 100% human-written (and also assets), but the engine itself has been made with AI assistance earlier? So the game-specific code would be human-written. It was a bit unclear if the restriction was also for the engine (especially if it existed earlier).

https://lazyanttu.itch.io/marcher-charter

Continuing my fantasy-colonial-themed turn-based 4X Marcher Charter from a previous jam. Already made progress, and my first devlog is a big update!

I made a major update to the game, and that bug should now be fixed alongside myriad other bugs. Again, thanks for reporting!

Thanks for the feedback and bug report!

I think I actually found the bug that caused events to soft-lock in some cases. I'll fix it sometime today and deploy!

Edit: I will deploy the fix in a week, after the jam period ends.

Hi

I just noted that the devlog required a URL. I have not created 1 devlog, but instead 16 smaller devlogs about the biggest changes. Was this an okay approach

Thanks for the feedback! And indeed, I do agree!

Practically for this jam I ran out of time, my original vision was to not use gen AI for dialogue or story content, but when I was looking down at the barrel at 3h left in submission and most still being unwritten, I just put it through gen AI machine to fill my fluent keys. It was a choice between not publishing, publishing something much less or using non-curated AI to write me stuff (I had written a story bible so it helped a bit). I chose the latter, but there were no good choices. I overscoped and failed in that :D

Actually, I managed to make the critical bug fixes a few minutes past the jam game, and I continued the project immediately on here:

https://lazyanttu.itch.io/the-unstable-key

That now has about 60-70% of the content written by me (I have replaced the majority of the AI-written stuff), with lots of bug fixes, and is much better. Of course, the rating is based on what I submitted on the jam, but I wanted to share some post-jam progress! :)


That was helpful to confirm my suspicion that it was a good idea to continue replacing the prose. I also think the issue is that there is so much variance in quality; I wrote some segments of the game carefully, and then there is a lot of slop. So those kinds of conflict with each other.

So the plan to use gen AI to write was not plan A; it was plan B once I ran out of time.

I got rid of it, but plan to do some better onboarding in the future!

Thanks, sounds reasonable!

Here is the fixed version: https://lazyanttu.itch.io/the-unstable-key 
It still contains some bugs, but not the game-breaking ones (hopefully not any) present in the jam version.

My maps for of war did not update after moving (but did after resting, loading the game, etc.), which caused a major issue. I fixed the bug but missed the deadline by a few minutes :'D

Should I remove the jam entry and instead push a fix so random people on itch don't have to play through a major broken feature?

Made my first improvement and first post-jam devlog to https://lazyanttu.itch.io/wordless-war that I'm going to polish for this jam ^^

Should I submit this game immediately, even though I'm going to make further devlogs and polish improvements, or only after I consider it "done" for this jam?

Spot on! The game would have required informative animations to communicate what was happening. I consider adding them after the jam.

Thanks for playing!

I'll "humble up" and add a few words after the jam and improve the presentation. It was fun to try this as a challenge, but it was too hard to pull off! I plan to improve this game after the jam based on the useful feedback.

I think it has depth, with the 6 unique factions having different play styles; they are not just reskins of each other.

Yeah, went too ambitious!

The tutorial side was the weak point, and I am either scrapping it or improving it much for the future. The highlight point is good. I consider adding that post-jam. Thanks for the idea!

Thanks for the feedback! Animated icons, better symbols, etc., would have made it much better indeed. I'm considering if I have time to make them post-jam to improve the experience.

Thanks for playing! I will, in the future, improve the presentation and add some words and symbols with better clarity. I considered taking a game from a text-heavy, complex genre and tried to distill it into a wordless game, but it was indeed too hard to pull off under this restriction!

Thanks for the feedback, and glad that you liked it!

Yeah, it was not perhaps the correct jam to get inspiration for this. I focused too much on the "wordless" part and less on the "immediately understandable".

Thanks! Likely was a bit too ambitious.

I need to work on the presentation and make it more approachable. Nice to hear you liked the presentation!

Thanks for the playtesting video; it was very enlightening to see how it went and what caused the wrong kind of confusion! That helped a lot to understand the issues.

Yes, you are correct. I am actually planning to reskin the game with UI and symbol improvements, and some text additions. I will still keep the faction mechanics and strategies partially hidden (it is part of the puzzle to decipher what they do), but currently, wrong things are causing confusion, like "what happens in battles", "how to move units", and "what these are". The mystery should be at a deeper level, not at the surface.

Indeed, this game couldn't be "wordless", but the jam restriction pushed it towards elegance, where it could be "almost" wordless; by contrast, games in the 4X/strategy genres usually have very large amounts of text and symbols.

Thanks for the video!

Thanks for the feedback, the tutorial definitely needs rework or to be removed. Something I am likely going to do at some point.

I can give you a hint: the level of units depends on the faction. They gain a minor combat bonus from higher levels, but typically, each faction's different-tier units start acting in different ways, either in macro or in combat capabilities. They also gain typically more slots for attachments on higher tiers.

The highest can be an okay strategy; typically, you have 2-3 options to choose from. There is usually one with the most raw power, and some with utility value (such as allowing/preventing retreat, destroying enemy attachments, etc.). Going with the highest power is not wrong.

Do you mean attack in the strategic map or in the tactical map? In combat, there is no advantage to the attacker. The defender has the advantage that the attacker must select a combat tactic first, and the defender can see what the attacker chose. But no numeric difference. Some factions may have a tactic that is effective against enemy bases, a rare attacker advantage.

Thanks for the insights!

Yeah, the tutorial was the weakest part of the game. I will either remove or rework it in the future.

Thanks for playing, and I will try to make the symbols more legible and easier to understand in the future. Glad you liked the presentation!

Thanks!

One of the core ideas is that you can still win and plan effectively without understanding all the factions/mechanics and what they do. So that was a kind part of the presented puzzle along the strategy game layer!

Thanks for the feedback! You are correct: the icons need a rework to communicate more effectively. I am actually planning to make post-jam edits with some level of text. It will still not spoil what the factions are or what they do, but will tell you how to play and what the different results are.

My vision is a game where the mystery is what the factions are, what they do, and what strategy to use. Not what the UI does, what a symbol means, or what happened in combat, etc.

Yeah, the tutorial was really weak. I'm planning to get rid of it or improve it. Thanks for the feedback!

Thanks for the feedback. The tutorial was definitely the weakest part of the game. I'm considering either reworking or removing it. People who jumped into the game usually understood better than those who went to the tutorial. I accidentally created an anti-tutorial.

I will be adding some low-level text and reworking the UI someday.

Thanks for the feedback! I am considering developing it further, with a focus on clarity (but still not revealing what the symbols are verbally)

The camera occaisionally worked unintuitively or against what I would have expected. The overall mechanics, the squid boss and the whirlwind concept worked well. Audio design was superb. There could have been a bit more juice as feedback.

Excellent gravity-well puzzle. The difficulty progression was smooth, but in many levels you did not have to use nearly all your stars. Could have been neat if the game would have shown you the minimum number of stars you used to complete a level.

It felt polished and intentional.

I liked many things about this game. Everybody tended to lead to the worm. But managed to win! I was hooked the entire time.

The mute button did not work for me.

Very nice, perhaps my favorite entry of this jam. Won it, but I don't know if there was a way to lose it?

It never occurred to me what the different dice results on the cubes meant.

Final score 1100

Nice job finishing a game in 3 hours!

Base idea as a typical platformer works; you could have spent the remaining 75 minutes adding a second or third level.

Nice and very strong entry!

Towards the end of the first level, I had thought that "hey, this would be cool if there were shooting enemies", and was gladly surprised by it having the next level! And the third level was blast!

I think this game rewarded positioning, flanking, and flow control nicely. Would like to see a longer version with more to do!

Nice work!

It was quickly intuitive, simple, and engaging. I liked the variety of the binas; it was fun to see the tower looking so chaotic. Good feedback for the player in SFX and in responsivity.