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Clockwork Spire's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Overall | #74 | 4.253 | 4.253 |
| Creativity | #149 | 4.278 | 4.278 |
| Enjoyment | #150 | 4.056 | 4.056 |
| Style | #162 | 4.426 | 4.426 |
Ranked from 54 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
How does your game fit the theme?
A twist on the classic tower defence genre, you build a tower upwards to extend the path and unlock more defence slots as you go. Scale the height of your spire to stay ahead of the scaling enemies and keep SAD-E safe.
Development Time
96 hours
(Optional) Please credit all assets you've used
Font: Gigabot
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Comments
It’s a High Tower Defence, if you’ll pardon the TF2 pun :)
This was fun! Definitely feels like there could be some Rogue Legacy aspect of unlocking more tower pieces and defences on subsequent playthroughs, maybe find some friends to help SAD-E out~
I think the art is adorable, definitely want to pat SAD-E and reassure them a little, though that might distract me from building the tower higher!
We will take the "Pet the robot" button into account next time haha. Glad you had fun! We would have liked to add some tower unlocks, something we'd probably do if we continue working on it in future. Thanks for playing!
and to think, SAD-E only exists as a carry over from one of our other ideas after we got too attached to how cute they looked in our heads 🥺
SAD-E is definitely cute!
I’ll have to stop playing for now, just because I want to rate a few more games in the last bit of time! But definitely resuming this later today (alt-tab fortunately seems to work as a pause substitute), I’m at 78 units tall now, would like to at least reach 100 if I can.
Thanks for the fun game!
Cool game. I like how this Tower Defense literally rely on building a higher tower. I only wish I had a button to speed up the enemy movements.
Thanks! We are in agreement about a speed up button haha. Something we only really remembered at the end and by then it was a bit late :P happy to hear you liked it though.
Very fun and engaging! The soundtrack adds a sense of urgency and the visuals feel very polished.
Awesome game that has so much potential to be expanded in the future with even more content! As it is now, this is an addicting experience filled top to bottom with polish. The only thing I felt it was missing was a speed-up button (or just make the first wave of slimes get to the tower a bit faster).
I really hope that you guys keep working on this game after the jam. I'd love to play a full version of it in the future!
This isn't any tower defense game. Try this one as soon as you can.
Wow, thank you! How do I pin a comment? :P Thank you so much for the glowing review!
Cute GFX.
A bit slow to start & sometimes slow during gameplay.
Thanks!
The start being a bit slow was partialy to give everyone time to adjust to the game and get their footing. I think we overshot a little too much though, good to know for next time!
What I sometimes do is: I keep a global variable which keeps track if it's a player's new game & first playthrough.
If it is, some starting variables can be slower, else I set more standard speeds for subsequent runs. :)
This is my favorite submission I've played so far! Making an actual "tower" defense is really creative and well executed. Plus all systems, art, sfx, etc. blend together really well. Good work!
That means a lot to us!
We had a lot of ideas right off the bat. It was quite the rush to get everything we could in and polished, but I think we came out the other end with a worthwhile experience at least.
very cool and original , really enjoyed it
Glad you enjoyed it! Thanks!
Super intuitive game and a really cool art style. Great job!
Thanks! We were worried about certain things not being communicated clearly but due to time constraints couldn't do much about it, so it's good to hear you found it intuitive :D
Pretty nice concept! It's really satisfying to see the tower getting higher and higher. The game gets quickly hard though. After 4 attempts, my best score was 57, which I guess is not so bad? But by the end I didn't really know what I could have improve or optimized. Some weapons seems not that much useful (I wasn't able to find a correct use for the acid), and sometime there are spots that can barely reach any enemy. So I didn't feel like I had much choice sometime, beside defending against magic or tech. But I guess tower defense is a difficult genre to balance. in the end I still had some fun playing it. Nice job!
Thanks for playing! We tend to find the game has peaks and troughs of difficulty and it seems to be around the 60 mark players have to really fight past so not a bad attempt at all! I will say that there is a large random element to it and those poor spots will sometimes have a great use... Time is also of the essence and enemies will scale with time, whereas new enemies appear with height! So if you hang around too long on lower floors you may find the enemies out scale your damage! Glad you had fun though and we appreciate the feedback :D
This game is really good! the style if very cute and the main gameplay loop is incredibly fun! Figuring out what each tower does and where to place it is a good process that actually made me feel like I was getting better at the game.
The acid trap felt too weak. Pretty much any time I tried to use it, I realised it didn't work where I'd placed it and put something else there instead, but that's just about my only real problem with this game. Really fun use of the theme and really good tower variety!
The acid tower did get a buff not long before launch - we thought it was one of the most fun towers to use so wanted it to feel good! Guess we missed the mark a little and needed to make it a touch more powerful 😅
When it hits, it hits well, I just found that there were quite a few spots where enemies would just walk past the trap without it activating or it would fall off the tower and explode, hitting nothing. I think it's less about it being more powerful and more about it actually applying the power it has. I really like the idea of it, but it just wasn't hitting enough for me. The other towers are really fun and more than made up for it though!
I enjoyed the strategy of working out where to place them, but I had a lot more time to play with and work out the game - I imagine that felt pretty punishing at times for new players 🤦🏻 I do think some of the other devs suggested moving some of the turret spots that looked like they should work for acid but didn't quite, sounds like I should've listened to them - sorry team! Thank you so much for the kind words and useful feedback :D
This is a great idea! Vertical tower defence! I would love a way to somehow keep the action down below as well, with horizontal tower defence games, I love how I can see all the turrets I have put at once, maybe enemies drop pickups to encourage the player to look back down the tower? Either way great game!
More reasons to scroll back down would be a great way to let you admire how big your tower is too, I know I was hesitant to suggest any ideas that encourage players to scroll away from the top of the tower as it can be a little punishing in later waves when the pressure is on - but some sort of drop from enemies for a risk/reward thing would be a great addition!
The game would have benefitted a lot from speed controls. It is indeed very polished and quite fun to play. Good job.
Yeah, there's definitely things we wanted to add but just didn't have time for, speed controls being one of those things! Other include better UI for damage types, Turret ranges, etc... Glad you enjoyed playing!
Found myself adjusting my towers as the run went on to change up what was effective. I liked the extra golden pieces being introduced later, the variety of tower pieces kept it interesting. Love that as it scales up you can scroll up and down and watch all your towers at work. Great work!
Thank you! I know in the later waves I found myself switching out certain weapons to save our poor lil robot - to me it felt like a nice balance where a little bit of micromanagement of the turrets helps out sometimes without it being forced on you all the time 😊
this is rather addictive, VERY well polished
Thank you! We got quite into playing it during testing too...
Ooooh yeah, baby! That's a cool game!
It's a very pretty polished game for a jam!
Making your badass tower to destroy those pesky... those... So you're making your level and defense in both ways!
Actually, I even would like to see tower to do not just destroy enemies on the road nearby but kill enemies everywhere! Just imagine this massive building destroying all around... Ahhhh... The man can dream!
Glad you enjoyed yourself!
Great level of polish, and I really liked the lowpoly art. The verticality of the game was very satisfying, I especially liked setting up synergies between the towers piece turret positions and shapes, although I only ever made them by chance and then approved upon them after seeing it working
Thank you! Max's art always blows me away - I felt blessed being able to use it to decorate our levels. Hopefully discovering the synergies felt rewarding, my thoughts were that we should let people discover their own synergies rather than show you the few synergies we already found 😊
Pretty great game. Keep at it and you've got a Steam release on your hands.
Thanks for playing! We're still debating taking it further, as three of us are already working on another game we plan to release. Glad you enjoyed <3
Top notch tower defense game. I quickly got addicted and played for about an hour!
I told myself and the team I had to play it a lot to "sort out the balancing", but I think secretly I was just addicted too 😂 Thanks for playing and for the positive feedback 😊
I played it for another hour tonight... It's the only game I've come back to for more! Made it to over 100 floors this time, but damn it, Luna still has the highest score! If you could check out our game Skyblocker I'd really appreciate it. :)
I definitely will - going to play a lot more jam games this evening after work! (which is unfortunately about 8 hours away right now, but it's something to look forward too!)
Really happy you've enjoyed it enough to come back for seconds! Luna is scaring me - she's almost beaten the current dev high score so I might have to jump in and set the top score if she gets any better :P
Oh it's on. It's on like Donkey Kong. 😅
There's small bits of polish needed here and there, but overall it was fun.
There are definitely a few ideas we still wanted in there to improve the level of polish and the player experience, but I'm glad you had fun with it 😊