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Holey Castle's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Theme | #22 | 4.065 | 4.065 |
| Fun | #90 | 3.587 | 3.587 |
| Game Design | #115 | 3.522 | 3.522 |
| Overall | #191 | 3.228 | 3.228 |
| Innovation | #228 | 3.043 | 3.043 |
| Graphics | #322 | 2.891 | 2.891 |
| Audio | #400 | 2.261 | 2.261 |
Ranked from 46 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
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Comments
Nice idea and cool concept with the Upgrades for the shovel. I really enjoyed playing it.
Nice work! :)
This was a fun challenge and a good spin on the genre, using only holes instead of weapons to defeat waves. I focused on getting as many holes as possible and then worked on upgrading them. It was a cool effect to add the depth levels with darker shading once you start to upgrade your holes. Great job on managing to animate all those different enemies in such a short time! Fun game overall.
Here’s mine if you want to check it out. https://itch.io/jam/brackeys-3/rate/572795
The gameplay is good. I liked the sense of progression with the upgrades. It was a bit tedious to click the shovel icon for every hole you wanted to dig, would've preferred to place as many as I want/can after one click. The game gets a bit tiresome after you get max out all of the upgrades, because then it's very easy and lasts quite long. Maybe have fewer waves, or make the waves stronger and give the player ability to buy some one-shot items, like catapult ammo or some magic thing you can do with the Excalidirt. The core gameplay is pretty fun though!
Nice game!!
I liked a lot the game having a background story. It gave me more immersion to play the game!
Loved the idea to administrate the position where you can put the hole, having to pay attention from where the enemies are comming and if the hole position will catch them.
The grahics are good, I could distinguish well wich enemy they are.
The SFX are nice too. It was ok to play it without music, but having a background music would be nicer.
I just had some difficulties reading what each upgrade does. Perhaps changing the font or the background would help. I think that the yellow bg color with the white font color is difficulting to read.
It's a real cool game and I had a lot of fun with it! I think it would suit well as a mobile game too, because of the touch screen.
Congratulations for the game!!!
Thanks for trying our game, we're glad you enjoyed it!
I had a bit of trouble picking a color for the text, because the background image was made a bit late. I agree it can be hard to read sometimes.
Nice pixel art, I like the backstory (EXCALIDIRT!!! ), though it would be nice to be able to skip the intro if you reload the game. The sound effects make it really fun!
Thanks for trying our game!
We're really happy with the aesthetic of the game(including the sounds and the graphics).
I agree the intro should be skippable, just forgot about it at the time.
I can see the inspiration from tower defense / Plants vs Zombies with holes :) Good job.
Really good game, well done. It was very frustrating having to click on 'dig' every time to place a new hole, I wish that once you clicked it you could place as many as you wanted without having to reclick each time. Having a description of the upgrades, or being told why enemies weren't falling in would have been nice but it was good being able to take your time to buy them. The holes could have been more clear about what they would catch, some enemies fell in that I wasn't expecting and some enemies I thought I would get didn't which was frustrating.
Polish needed but a very coo start to a great game.
Pretty cool idea for a game, but as others have said, it needs a lot of polish. It was fun to try though, I hope you'll give my game a try! :)
Game has a good start for a nice tower defense, and even though i played it briefly there are couple things which could be developed further.
- The wave system could be rather automatic, that you have some certain time between waves to buy upgrades, that would make the player react with bit more 'urgency'
-The upgrades to the shovel could be described, for example I was rather clueless what the depth of the hole did.
-Maybe add a wave counter? I played for a while but am unsure what wave I was at.
- Adjust the hitboxes a bit, some enemies fell into the hole even though their hair just slightly touched the hole's area.
Apart from those you have a fun game going, and I really liked the variation between enemies rushing your way.
Thanks for trying our game! Regarding your suggestions:
We wanted to make the in between waves a safe place for the player to think about what upgrades to buy and to prepare the holes for the next wave.
The shovel depth has an explaination in the tutorial. We didn't really know where else to put them, since they follow a patern("can dig <attribute> holes").
I think that while a wave counter would be a good idea, it has the potential to make the game too easy. You can just remember the critical waves and buy the necessary upgrades.
We chose to have generous hitboxes, in order to not make the player feel cheated if the character barely misses it.
Playing you game was a lot of fun
Using hole for tower defence is an interessting idea.
Some feedback and improvements:
- I really like how the hole 'fuse' together with their diffent colors merging, instead of overlapping
- The addition of the wooden golem creatures made the game much more interessting
- The pacing is a bit off. Wave often feal redundant and new enemies are introduced a pretty slow pace (especially in the end)
- The pacing of the holes feal a bit tedious, clicking the button over and over again can be anoying to the player. There are better solutions.
- It would be nice to see how many holes you can still dig
- The sound of the enemies dieying is repeated very ofter. Changing the pitch a bit each time one dies can ease this problem.
These are some suggestion I'd have to make the game even better.
Keep it up and happy jamming.
Glad you enjoyed our game!
I agree, we could've done a better job with the waves. The reason why enemies are introduced at a slow pace towards the end is because they originally didn't exist when the rest of the waves were created. For example, the golems were introduced in the final day of the jam.
We experimented with pressing a button to dig holes, but we weren't sure how unity would handle collisions when 2 objects are placed in the exact same spot(something possible with having to press a button, but pretty much impossible when you have to move the mouse). An early bug where the waves would sometimes end before all of the enemies were defeated(meaning your holes would be erased) made us scrap this.
I agree with the other ideas. Thank you for trying our game and for the suggested ideas!
Really fun game, although in my first 10 minutes of playing this i thought i was supposed to spam the button, i haven't noticed that i spawned the hole on my mouse, but other than that; its really fun!
the game does need some music however the gameplay was fun and i enjoyed playing this game however it would be good if i knew how many holes i had left and also for the enemies to have hitboxes at the feet so that they are able to walk past and not fall into a hole with their heads as that broke the immersion and made it seem like the characters were not actually making contact with the ground. also shadows, they are very easy to make. for the last thing the art was decent however it could have been better.
lack of music was a bit downer and because of silent background enemy death sounds became irrritating after a while. maybe it's just me but it felt kinda intuitive to be able to use coins for placing extra holes (same way you're able to use coins/mana to either place extra towers/or upgrade existing ones in other tower defence games) so took me a while to figure out that wasn't the case at the start. despite all, i had fun, good job.
We really wanted to add some background music, but, due to our lack of knowledge in this field, we were unable to do so.
I guess we could've done a better job at explaining the hole mechanics in the tutorial.
Sorry for these inconveniences, but we're glad you had a fun time playing the game.
yeah once i figured it out, it was fun. i can see spending quite a lot of time playing more polished version of this since i love tower defence genre and quirky humor.
oh man I love your game I laughed so loud at the intro when he says the EXCALIDIRT that was funny man you made my day.
your game can be the best ever with some graphics and audio,
some new textures and animations and you got already a good game: )
Glad you enjoyed it! It was a blast coming up with the story and making it seem more interesting.
I think calling it the best is quite a stretch, but thank you for the kind review!
A Game about where you build holes to protect your kingdom. Nice, really liked the idea. This feels like plants vs zombies. Very nice intro and beautiful art. Nice.
We took inspiration from PvZ's more lanes open as you get further in order to balance the different waves.
Glad you enjoyed the art! It was my friend's first time making pixelart and we like how it turned out.
Really enjoyed this game! Loved how there is strategy behind it I also loved the into at the start it set the tone very well. I loved purchasing upgrades and thinking about which upgrades would be best for the next wave! Well done!
Glad you enjoyed purchasing the upgrades. We thought about it for quite a while until we settled on these ones.
Thank you for playing our game!
The upgrades really made the game more enjoyable :)
I really liked the tower defense like design! It was fun upgrading the holes haha. I got to the shiny armored knights. A really cool idea! The intro was great too. use this prototype and make a super cool game like this! Great job submitting a game to the jam! Please check out mine when you have time :)
It took us quite a lot of time to come up with the idea, but I think it was a pretty good one.
Thanks for trying our game!
You've got a solid game as well!
What a great intro!
A tower defense game with a twist, instead of towers you build hole.
Fun puzzle/strategy game.
Also I find the enemies UGH UGH UGH UGH sound effects funny for some reason. XD
Thank you for trying our game! We really enjoyed it a lot more after adding the sounds as well.