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your attempt to avoid certain doom at the hands of exponential-ish growth: a tower defense game's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Controls | #2 | 3.818 | 3.818 |
| Originality | #3 | 3.818 | 3.818 |
| Fun | #5 | 3.818 | 3.818 |
| Accessibility | #6 | 3.091 | 3.091 |
| Overall | #7 | 3.429 | 3.429 |
| Audio | #10 | 3.364 | 3.364 |
| Graphics | #15 | 3.364 | 3.364 |
| Theme | #30 | 2.727 | 2.727 |
Ranked from 11 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Godot Version
3.5.2
Wildcards Used
N/A
Game Description
You control a small army of ships trying to defend earth from a very scary threat: an out of control self-replicating space probe, which can easily overwhelm the unsuspecting defender. Buy and upgrade ships, and dynamically move them around the screen by clicking and dragging. Good ship coordination is key to defeating the threat!
How does your game tie into the theme?
The game is about a malfunctioning space probe.
Source(s)
https://github.com/HoneyPony/your-attempt-to-avoid-certain-doom-at-the-hands-of-exponential-ish-growth-a-tower-defense-game
Discord Username
honey_pony3049
Participation Level (GWJ Only)
This is my 4th GWJ submission
My game has an export for Linux, Windows, & Mac and/or is playable through HTML5
description
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Comments
That's a really great game you made! Micromanaging your "towers" in this tower defense was a lot of fun. Every jump in difficulty meant I had to scramble to optimize my damage output by tactically moving my space armada; every slow round left me with something to do. There was a lot of variation in space ships to upgrade and explore and every one felt like it had a purpose (except maybe the purple replication-blocking one - I didn't feel its impact a lot), which kept the game fresh until the end. A+ gameplay, really.
As for critique, I really only have one pain point. As the game went on, it was increasingly tedious to find space ships you hadn't upgraded yet. There wasn't a visual difference (at least I didn't notice one), so I had to either remember which space ship had which upgrades or click myself through every one of them. I understand that this is a jam game and you are a solo dev and it's an ultimately small nuisance, but it's something you may want to consider if you choose to expand on this game later.
The sprites and special effects were simple, but pretty. The enemy block blobs were pleasantly colorful and watching it multiply felt really satisfying. Shame I had to blow it up. Visually, everything stayed clear despite the chaos of the rapidly multiplying blob of blocks and space lasers. The sound effects were fitting and the music was fine for the most part, but descended into unpleasant noise at some points.
It would have been nice to see more of the theme in the game - the "malfunction" aspect is largely relegated to the story, but doesn't show in the visuals or the gameplay.
All in all, this was a very enjoyable entry.
Absolutely agree on your pain point. Different skins for upgrades was one of those features I put on the "if I have time" list. Of course, I did not have time. 😄
Unfortunately for me my musical tastes consist of a great deal of enjoyment of unpleasant noise. I suppose I will have to tone it down in the future, considering all the feedback this jam! 😄
Thank you for the feedback!
One of the few games in this style that doesn't feel like it exists just to kill time but is rather quite engaging.
At first I felt the difficulty tuning wasn't quite right as it seemed much harder in the beginning but afterwards got much easier. I guess my expectation was that it would just ramp up as it went but, in actuality, this ended up being a story through gameplay.
The challenge is at first daunting but, with a bit of effort, you overcome it enough that it's still a challenge but no longer the impossible task it first seemed. Eventually you start to get so confident and self-assured in taking the probes down that you don't need to even try anymore, that is, until it starts to get a bit tougher near the end again to humble you right back down and make you take it seriously. I always love when you can get a story like that through pure gameplay.
However, it can get a bit tricky to click the right thing at times or keep track of all the ships as you get more and more of them and the sound gets quite messy with all the shooting and drilling. I also found it weird that a malfunction would give the probes the ability to self-replicate but all in all, a great submission to the jam! I'm pleased to have played it!
Thank you for the feedback! I'm glad that the gameplay arc you experienced ended up making sense. I definitely wanted the probes to get really strong at the end -- the first time I played with the current ending, it was like, super exciting for me and a great experience, and I hope some of that translated to everyone else's playthroughs.
Also, thank you for the feedback on the sound! If I'm honest, I literally cannot even hear the drill sounds unless I buy the drills in debug mode with a bunch of extra cash (so there's nothing else on screen)... they just get masked by everything else. I think I definitely need to learn more about mixing to make the cacophony work a bit better... I tried to use a compressor on the SFX bus at one point, but it seemed like I got a pumping effect that was even more annoying. I think better sound design would help as well.
Thanks for playing!
Speaking for myself, it worked exactly how it was intended, I even died once right at the beginning and won the next try like I saw you mentioning in the comments to someone as the "ideal" playthrough experience. The ending definitely made me work hard after I was just cruising ahahah.
Ye, these games seem to always end up struggling with this kind of thing and to be fair, it's understandable, it's a difficult thing to know how to fix but something that is also easily noticeable. I guess panning could help (I don't know if there's any already or not as I didn't play with headphones) but only for headphones so the only other thing I can think of is to try to make the sounds for each thing be on a different range of frequency, like, the horizontal lasers could be a low tone, the green shooting middle and missiles more high pitched. Basically, you'd first focus on making it so that all the sounds playing at once in the most messy way would still sound harmonious rather than choosing a sound for each and then try to make it work together.
Another idea could be having slightly different rhythms for each thing so the chance of them playing at the same time is lower. Then, even if it's still a bit messy it's not as constant which might be better. For rhythms I mean you could have something firing on slow septuplets and something else that also needs to be just as slow could be on a slow sextuplet. The septuplets are a bit faster but it's a minimal difference that I think would keep the mechanics of everything still balanced and by having a rhythm everything is a bit more harmonious, hopefully. But those are just some suggestions ^^
As for mixing, it can be hard, take your time and if you can get someone who already knows something about it to help you.
My Pleasure!
I found this to be an all-rounder, great entry!
Having different ships with upgrades was pretty cool, and the enemies were very large and yet didn't get godot to lag, which is impressive.
The music was so zen and relaxing wow. I can tell you put a lot of thought into the sound design, though as mentioned earlier sometimes there is too much sound.
The controls, and ship speed are very intuitive and allow the game to play out really well.
Adding some random downgrade on the ships as they continue to fight would've been a great addition to the theme. For example, the laser ship could start out really start, but as its laser overheats, it becomes unstable doing more damage/piercing but firing slowly in a curved path until it gets repaired.
Haha don't be too impressed by the apparent non-laginess of the game. 😅 For me, the end of the normal game lag spikes whenever a new enemy spawns. Moreover -- I actually originally planned for there to be two enemies on screen for longer, but the game just got too laggy with the larger enemies when there were two, so I cut it down to one. So the lag actually directly influenced the final game product!
Also, I completely could not get the game optimized enough to run on the web. (I did try! I spent a few hours fixing the rendering lag, and then spent more hours writing a custom GDScript physics engine to try to speed up the physics enough... no avail. Perhaps after the jam is over I can fix it!)
I appreciate the suggestions for more on-theme content! If I'm going to be honest I generally am not interested in following the theme too closely unless it's a concept I want to delve deeper into. For this jam, I saw the theme, thought of "malfunctioning self-replicating probes", built the probes in Godot, and then came up with a game that I could center around the probes. For me, the probes really are the central concept of this game, and the probes are inspired directly from the theme... so for me, it follows the theme. Obviously it is not a very interesting use of the theme, and is perhaps not deserving of very many Theme stars. But at least now you know where I am coming from. 😄
Thank you for playing and for your feedback!
Great entry! I enjoyed this a lot, especially the idea of the self-replicating enemy. It adds urgency to the gameplay, and thus fun. In my opinion the graphics and the sound, and maybe also the theme setting, suggest a different genre than "tower-defense": as other suggested in the comments, it's more an "arcade" game! I'm not saying that this is a problem, I was just surprised when I started playing :)
With the hope of being constructive, I tell you that having something that grows exponentially is often a risk in games. Exponential growth induces positive feedbacks: the larger the enemy, the faster it becomes even larger, and so on and so forth. That might be a problem for game balance, because a little error at the beginning - maybe you read the tutorial too slowly and the enemy grows too much - can soon ruin the whole game. Based on a true story :P
However, when I managed to destroy the first enemies, I had enough money to build more ships and the game became immediately easier, because I was shooting at them even before they start to replicate. In conclusion, it felt to me that the game was sometimes too hard, sometimes too easy. That's of course just my experience, I don't mean to tell you what to do with this :)
As a proof that I still enjoyed the game, let me flex my final score :P
I don't even know if it's bad or good, I was just proud to have lasted that much ahaha
Thanks again, and congratulations!
Thank you for playing!
The risk of exponential growth is, or at least was intended to be, the real point of the game. It was extremely intentional on my part that a small slip up early on leads to total doom (and I experienced this myself while playtesting). Moreover, I broadly figured the best gameplay arc would be: player slips up, loses, restarts, and then wins. I guess the idea is: I wanted this game to demonstrate just how scary exponential growth is.
(I originally thought I might title the game something like "fragile defense" to try to communicate how... well... fragile your defense necessarily is against exponential self-replication. Unfortunately I also had recently set myself the goal of making a game with a really long title 😄)
The language about good ship coordination, and what not, is really also about destroying the enemies before they start replicating.
So depending on what exact kind of difficulty unbalance you experienced, it may be completely intended. Of course, even if the unbalance is intentional, it still might be bad. I personally think I like the idea still, but YMMV. 😄
One side note: enemies shouldn't be spawning while the tutorial is open. If they were that's a bug. Also, for reading the ship "info" screens, it should be possible to do that while paused--but this is only communicated in the game description so it may be easily missed.
Thank you for the feedback!
Ok, you were perfectly conscious of everything, nevermind 🙃
In this case, I can assure you that the game serves its purpose of "unstable balance", which is of course a legit and valid gameplay choice! And yes, I followed exactly your planned arc, so evidently the presentation works as intended!
The title is great, I love extremely long titles, please don't change it :P
Regarding the spawning, I didn't remember exactly whether the enemy spawned during the tutorial or it was there since before, so don't take my words as a bug report ^^" Besides that, I also missed the pause button (sorry, I'm a terrible playtester ahaha), so reading the description was indeed unnecessarily difficult. Glad it was all my fault :')
Again, thanks and congrats!
This is NOT a tower defence game! Tower defence games are boring and unimaginative (often - that's a gross oversimplification)
This is more like an arcade game in slow motion...
and...
I flippin love it!
It is so well tuned and balanced. The enemies come in at the right speed (on normal mode at least) that you can learn and play with the upgrades and different ship types as you grow.
I had to drag myself away from the game as I need to spend time reviewing other games tonight. But this is super enjoyable (like really)
Also, one other note, the music (yes pun intended here) starts really awkwardly I thought but then transforms and grows on you as the game develops, it really draws you in as a player.
Thank you for playing & for your feedback! It's great to hear that the game balance was working well. That was definitely something I tried to get right.
I've been doing more weird improvisational and/or synthesizer based music for my games lately... it's definitely a bit bizarre, but it's, I think, less stressful for me to make and sometimes turns out quite nice. I'm glad it ended up working for you!
Very compelling experience! If a game gets me to play and lose track of time, it's a win for me. Excellent work!
This is a really cool idea for a tower defense game, it really feels more like one of those incremental progression games like Cookie Clicker (In a good way lol). I really enjoyed this and spent a lot more time than I had originally intended to playing it, great job!