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Going North's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Game Design | #326 | 3.500 | 3.500 |
| Innovation | #354 | 3.400 | 3.400 |
| Fun | #389 | 3.400 | 3.400 |
| Overall | #393 | 3.400 | 3.400 |
| Graphics | #414 | 3.550 | 3.550 |
| Audio | #421 | 3.200 | 3.200 |
| Theme | #620 | 3.350 | 3.350 |
Ranked from 20 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
In what way does your game fit the theme?
Multiple towers can form poker hands, making them stronger *together*.
Did you write all the code yourself and made all the assets from scratch?
All of the code with the exception of a JSON parser and volumetric lighting was written by us. All the visual assets were made during the jam. Sound effects were... improvised. Background music is royalty-free music.
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Comments
great game :D won the normal gamemode with all my health left, the art is good and the music choice is also good, and fits with the game :D I found playing very fun, good job :)
So I didn't read anything before downloading the game and It was a nice surprise to play a Tower Defense game. It was a really fun game, I've won on my first playthrough and I had 43 HP left. Great game !
Very fun game. I love the graphics and the music was very fitting for the game. Very fun, keep up the good work :D
Nice game. I like the visuals and music.
Glad you enjoyed it! :)
What an interesting concept! It was so wacky to get my head around the idea of a tower defence game with playing cards haha, very creative game and the use of the theme with the subject matter and game genre was great. I felt the progression could have been faster perhaps? Either more money per enemy or less money to upgrade along with waves that increased in difficulty more quickly. I lost health on the first two or three waves and then the enemy chips barely got out of their spawn point for the next 15 waves while I slowly upgraded one card every turn or two. That sort of balancing would be expected with a full game though, for a game jam it's a great effort and well done for such an 'out there' idea! There was a minor bug in that the music cut out whenever the heart shot at an enemy, but otherwise it all worked as expected!
Nice work :)
Thanks! The progression is a bit wonky, I agree, we did kinda did spend only a day on thinking about the values and the enemy waves, so it ended up feeling quite rushed. The cost scaling of upgrades definitely needs a lot more work, for some of the towers it definitely goes up too fast. The music bug was due to a typo I made when writing the SFX code last-minute, so I still feel pretty silly over that haha, basically the heart plays the enemy damage sound so many times at once it breaks Unity鈥檚 sound engine and makes it go silent until the sounds stop playing.
Glad you enjoyed it! :)
This is great!
Very original and goes well with the theme too
It was very satisfying watching the huge difference as soon as you got a good hand like straight flush
Definitely got me addicted and got to win all 50 waves (with 6 hp remaining 馃ぃ)
With a bit more polish and a bunch of extra maps, you could very well make this a full game
Great job!
Thank you! Very happy you enjoyed the game. We spent all of day 1 and 2 thinking about the theme, we knew that we wanted to do a tower defense game from the get-go, but the poker hand mechanic came to mind only on day 2, so glad putting a lot of thought into that department paid off. :)
The game definitely is a bit hard, very easy to lose a lot of HP on some waves haha, glad you enjoyed it!
This was nice! I liked the subtle details like the health bars and the smoothness of the game. I wish the 'Hands' system was a little more intuitive so that I could develop a better plan for achieving one. Maybe a little tutorial pushing the player to make a simple hand would be good or a reference sheet or maybe a suggested placement for new towers to form hands from the towers already on the field. The piano music was great and I loved the little procedural music going on with the bomb towers.
Thank you! We wanted to implement a reference sheet, but we ran out of time, but I do agree, the hands system does warrant a bit more elaboration, it鈥檚 a bit of a complex mechanic. Suggested placement is an interesting idea, maybe lighting up cards in different colours as you鈥檙e placing a new one to show where a combination could be expanded would鈥檝e been a good way to make the mechanic more intuitive. The music-y sound effects were a moment of inspiration for me as I realised that drums for sound effects would fit really nicely with the jazz aesthetic. I am glad you enjoyed it! :)
Nice game, great graphics, cool music. Could use a bit of balansing. It was way to hard at the start and then it jus became easier. I stopped playing at wave 33. The music also stopped playing after a while.
I am glad you enjoyed it! The balancing is a bit wonky, yeah, most of it was done last-minute at 5am haha. It is quite challenging in the beginning, I agree, I think it鈥檚 mainly due to the scarcity of cash which later on becomes much less scarce so you can afford more towers. If I remember correctly, the difficulty ramps back up around wave 40-50, so it鈥檚 worth trying if you have the time and the urge, I think that鈥檚 where most of my attempts ended up failing.
The music bug is a very silly one, basically, I accidentally forgot to put in a
!in an if statement that plays sound effects, so lasers and gas towers, which deal damage multiple times per second, cause the damage sound effect to play every single time it damages an enemy. This then overloads Unity鈥檚 sound system and basically makes it give up while the sound effects are playing, drowning out the music. You can fix this by turning the SFX volume down to 0 and the music should keep playing.Thank you for playing! :)
This one was... Well, quite addictive ! The music was well chosen, the graphics were nicely made, and I loved the poker-themed atmosphere.
I stopped at wave 23, seeing that there was no more new units and that they just had no chance of going further than the first line. Imo, the game could use a bit more balance, to maybe make it a bit harder. An increasing amount of HP/wave for the units might be a solution.
However, I really felt I could get easily addicted and just playing it on my phone casually. Good job !
We're glad you liked it! We originally had a different setting for the game in mind - a sci-fi-80s mix, but we ended up completely changing direction on the second day to the current poker theme due to not having a clue on how to properly execute the original theme, and we're happy we changed it seeing as it made the game unique.
I agree that the balancing would need some more work, but we were low on time, and I wrote the waves at 5AM on the 6th day. The game overall only had around two hours of proper playtesting.
The last 10 waves were never played before submitting the game.As it stands now, the late tens and twenties plateau in difficulty, but afterwards it does start somewhat increasing difficulty. The fact I find most amusing is that you were 2 waves away from a new enemy :). New enemies are introduced every 4 - 8 waves or so. In total there are 50 waves with around half the enemies being introduced around the 23rd.When you get the time, perhaps try finishing all 50 waves :).
You really nailed the theme, honestly !
Ooooh ! My bad, I assumed that there was no more new things and that the waves were just spawning more and more ennemies. I'll definitely launch the game again to go and beat it to the 50th wave !
And don't worry if you ran out of time for more things, we all did. That's the beauty of gamejams ! :)
Tower defense games are my addiction and this is a pretty good one. the only issue for me that i got too much money, it makes it a little bit easy. other than that it was super fun. congrats
If you can play my game and rate it, i will be very glad
https://itch.io/jam/brackeys-5/rate/927213
I have a slight addiction to tower defense games myself, so this seemed like a really fun idea. As for the money issue, yeah, my teammate who balanced the waves mentioned that being an issue, but we didn鈥檛 have enough time to properly balance it. I am very glad you enjoyed our game though! :)
I realy liked the aesthetic of the game . good game , Good Job !
Thank you! I am very happy you enjoyed the game. :)
I liked playing that game ! :D
I especially liked the music, jazzy chill tune that perfectly fits the casino ambiance.
Some token design are interesting like the regenerating one that I didn't see often in Tower Defense games !
I ran into one "bug" the heart card laser's sound completely muted the music, and I "died" at lvl 38 ~ my health went to 0 but the game continued and I played until 50, no gameover ^^'
Also I would have liked to get cards statistics when selecting it, one the left side for example between card pool and money. So that I can compare, pick my build and see hand bonus.
And last small GUI, when hovering something that can be selected, you could highlight it so the user knows he can click there, and you could make the description tooltip appear right when hovering, following the cursor as anchor.
Thanks for sharing your game ! :)
Glad you enjoyed the game, it makes me really happy to know that the jazzy tune helps set the casino ambience. The laser muting the music is because the game plays a sound effect every time the enemy is damaged and since the laser deals damage continuously, the sound effect is played multiple times per second overloading the audio listener. I thought I fixed it, but once I noticed it after submitting, I realized that I made a typo in the fix (forgot a
!in the if statement) and so lasers continue to destroy sound in the game. :(I like the highlighting idea, absolutely would add that if I could, it鈥檇 make the UI easier to understand. The tooltip is a bit rough and I wanted to make it so it doesn鈥檛 disappear as long as it鈥檚 over the button, but I did not have the time to do so. Thanks for playing our game! :)
Liked the song and the graphics where good, the life indicators on the chips where kinda hard to see and the difficulty goes up really fast, specially with the branching paths
I can see how the indicators could be hard to spot, though we did try to make them as visible as possible while also keeping them seamless. The difficulty curve is really steep, I agree, I had to do numerous attempts until I could figure out something that works in later waves, my teammate made the game really challenging haha, but he beat it, so it is possible, just difficult.
Glad you enjoyed the game! :)
Really liked the game, thought the audio was great, and the graphics were good. My suggestions for improvement would be some kind of auto send feature, a game over screen and maybe a little more of an explanation for the hands idea? However, overall I found this game very fun and these are only minor things.
Thank you! Really happy that you liked the audio, a lot of it was improvised last minute because some mechanics took much more effort to implement than we thought. The game over screen was made, but there鈥檚 a typo in the code so it doesn鈥檛 appear haha. The explanation of the hands is a bit lacking yeah, certainly one of the things I鈥檇 change if I could. Really happy you enjoyed the game, it was very fun to make. :)