This is more detailed than I thought it would be at first. It's essentially, tower defence; you're attacked by an endless wave of heroes aiming to smash your collection of crystals, and you create monsters to fight back against them; your monsters are confined to the square they're on, but you can upgrade them with points. Points (well, "souls") get generated by your crystals, so you have the normal tower-defence decision to make, of "do I have a whole bunch of quite rubbish monsters", versus "do I have only a couple of monsters but upgrade them continuously until they turn into the Hulk"? And I'm not sure which is actually best here, which is a good sign. The upgrade tree is complex, though; all created monsters start as a blob, and depending on which of their stats you upgrade, they turn into a variety of different monsters, and I never had a very good handle on which collection of upgrades turned my blob into a mega blob, or a skeleton, or a demon. It would be good if there were some sort of on-screen indication of where the next upgrade or upgrades will occur and what they might be, so I can choose to evolve in a different direction without having to try to make notes about what the upgrade tree looks like. One of the upgrade paths even leads to crystals, interestingly, so you can breed more crystals to get more points, thus regaining your power source after the heroes have destroyed some of them. This is a good mechanic, and I liked the ideas behind this game quite a lot. It suffers from the 64px restriction, though; the playfield is bigger than the screen, so you end up scrolling around the battlefield while looking at it through a pinhole, which is pretty annoying. But that doesn't affect the core gameplay much, and I like the core gameplay. Nice work.

Also, since I'm a developer and all, I thought, hahaha, I'll just stop the game in the debugger and give myself 100,000 souls and then I can upgrade everything and win massively. I was rather crestfallen to find out that the hero generation rate is actually tied to the number of souls you've got, so my little hacking adventure lasted about a minute before an unstoppable wave of hero death overwhelmed my monster force faster than I could upgrade them or add reinforcements. Very clever, developers. :-)

So I played it thinking it was quite constrained at 64x64.

Then I read the comments and realised you could scroll the map, tried again, and had a better time with it. Though to be fair, I'm not sure how you could show that the map can be scrolled within the confines of the game without explicitly pointing it out in a tutorial pop-up or something.

Either way, enjoyed the game!

I enjoyed it. And kinda liked figuring it out without looking at the rules! It's basically low rez Plants vs. Zombies.

I did spend a little too much time in the stat upgrade menu and not looking at the game, but guess that's to be expected with the lack of space! Cool game!

At first, I got a bit discouraged by the fact that there was no tutorial or a main menu, and I had to read a wall of text to understand the mechanics, which I think would discourage a lot of people from playing this otherwise  fantastic game. I thought not knowing how monsters would evolve would be bad, but after getting a bit involved and discovering some new variants, I had a bitter defeat and I found myself at the score of 507 souls and 289 hero kills. If theree was a documentation to note discovered monster types, I think I could play this all night ;)

139 souls, 79 hero kills. I hope this is a good score for the first play ahaha. I liked the game and I'm gonna play it a bit more after this rating. I like the fact that it goes directly to the game. the gameplay it's not complex. I just have to point out the fact that the camera doesn't move properly, but aside from that, well done!

PS: If you have the time, take a look at my game for this jam, https://itch.io/jam/lowrezjam-2018/rate/293637

Cheers

Fun little game. I didn't read the instructions so took me a while to realise the map scrolled. I thought I was kicking butt, except I was restricting myself to the initial 64x64 grid.