Thanks for that. Hammerhead Squad and Under Water Tactics were both good games that could easily have taken first place. It was a good, albeit small, competition, and we enjoyed it immensely. We actually started the jam with a mental plan to create a top down, no-elevation single floor turn based scifi tactics game, similar to Rebelstar on the ZX Spectrum. We even had some walls prepared in Blender. Then the theme "Underwater" was revealed and we had to throw that all out of the water(!). For underwater, where you can swim up and down, we felt there had to be elevation involved. But the problem there is that if you can't see the whole map then you could be shot from offscreen, so we decided to have the whole map visible all the time. Controls in 3D are tricky, as you probably saw, but we think we did our best, given the time we had and the theme "curveball".

We actually rolled our eyes slightly when we saw "Underwater" because, as you saw, in our last jam we chose to make the underwater game "Dungeon Diver" under the "Duality" theme (water and air) and then thought we were done with that genre. Still it was a lot of fun putting another aquatic game together for this jam.

Best of luck with your next game and hopefully see you here next year for the Turn-based Tactics Jam 2025.

Thanks for the great feedback. We were really pleased with how much we managed to do and how it turned out. We spent a bit of time creating the floating up death animation in Blender to get that effect and we were really pleased with it. It's great to see them float all the way to the top and off camera. 

We really wanted to be able to make an informed decision about who you could shoot and what the chances of hitting them were before you moved to a cell and took the shot. We also wanted to add the chance to "be hit" from units that could see you from a target cell as well, but didn't get that in there before the deadline. The line of sight indicator is solid if it's 100% chance to hit (and 100% means you will hit, looking at you XCOM) and dashed if it's less than 100%. Targets you can't hit have no lines drawn. If you press F1 you can also see the 100 ray casts we send out from the character to a capsule to determine the %age visibility. Red lines would hit something else, green would hit the target.

The mouse sensitivity was a real pain. Because we wanted to be able to mouse wheel to change the height of the cursor but stay on the same vertical column, we had to warp the pointer to the center of the cell above. It turns out it's very hard to warp the system cursor on most platforms (especially WebGL), so we had to create our own software cursor that we tracked internally, but at that point we didn't have access to any of the system mouse configurations (Windows/Mac/etc.) for pointer speed/acceleration so we just matched it to our local mouse settings, which are probably way too fast for most people. We'll try to get the system mouse information next time (Unity Input.mouseDelta is in a unknown unit, it for sure isn't pixels).

When we do game jams we spend all the jam time on the game, taking time off work (and family) to get it done to the best of our ability. So in effect we had most of 14-15 days with two of us working on it (graphics artist/game designer and programmer). This is how we managed to get so much done. We did use a few off the shelf Unity asset store assets too which we'll list in an upcoming blog post.

Thanks again for organizing the jam. Sign us up for the next one!

Thanks for you comments, we really appreciate you playing our game. We spent a lot of time trying to get the "look" right. We'll do a break down of the layers in a blog soon. We're glad you enjoyed the mechanics. As usual we had more plans than we could implement in the time but we got the core ideas in there.

The weapons had limited balancing done to them and, as you spotted, the torpedo launcher was designed to be an area of effect weapon, like an RPG, but we ran out of time again so it was more a hinderance than anything. We should have reduced the AP to 2 for the final build, spot on.

We did think about making the AI avoid the mines, but where's the fun in that! So we left it so that you could guide them into the mines with strategic positioning of your units. An emergent benefit of not so good AI!

Getting the camera controls and voxel cell cursor to work in a useful and intuitive way was most of the problem we had during the jam. We spent a lot of time with prototypes trying to see what worked best, and cursing ourselves that we'd decided to go with elevation in a turn based strategy game! We're fairly happy with how it turned out though.

We will definitely add Q/E to rotate the scene. We were mentally trying to go for a single button to drive the whole game, thinking ahead to a possible iPad version where you just have 1 finger. Also we had Mac users previously who only had one button mice and could barely use the keyboard! For a PC game though, additional keyboard controls should be an option and we'll make it happen.

Thanks again for all your kind words and for creating a great game yourselves. Best of luck with future jams and we'll see you in the next Turn-Based Tactics Jam.