itch.io

Simple premise, but solid execution: nice SFX, game is fun and engaging. High score or something similar would be cool, as well as a way to ramp up the difficulty or introduce new concepts more as you go longer, as-is, it can become a bit repetitive. 

Excellent puzzle design

Love the artistic aspect the most! Nice entry

The controls I struggled with, it went through even worse iterations. The issue was players naturally want to click to place a new creature but also sometimes click to view handbook page of the unit clicked on, and it wasn't easy for me to come up with a simple way to distinguish the two apart from what I landed on. Re: tutorial, I agree, that's something I wish I had done better than text strings.

Regarding theme, one layer is the less spawns is more skill, but also the concept of creature transformation; the number of creatures is always conserved but they transform, meaning less of one creature always means more of another (different way to think of Less Is More). At least that's how I rationalized it :) . Thanks for feedback!

It's a hard game, don't worry :) Glad you liked it though.

Thanks for the feedback, I'm glad you enjoyed!

The navigation layer is a little complicated, but I use flow fields and hierarchical grids to figure out how to move towards the nearest enemy for each unit. Then, each unit is also treated like a boid (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boids). They have multiple incentives, including cohesion to allies, avoidance from obstacles (friendly units/walls),  alignment with flock, and, crucially, ranged units have an additional force to run away from the nearest enemy within their attack range while their weapon is on cooldown. This creates the behavior you noticed and the tendency for ranged units to hide behind allies and kite enemy units, whereas melee units have an additional force to pursue the nearest enemy rather than avoid.

It's an interesting idea to be able to control a single character or a hero character while the chaotic battle unfolds, though it's also not necessarily in line with my initial vision for this project. I've had less time to work on the game lately so I wouldn't expect this feature soon. Maybe in a future follow-up title :)

Thank you. I've taken your feedback and added floating damage numbers and health bars to hopefully make battles easier to follow. 

Thanks for playing!

Thanks for the feedback -- very useful! I've started adding sound to the game, so far just combat SFX in the last update, but more to come. 

Support unit behavior is now on the list of things to improve (right now they will always target the nearest viable target, ie for Beastpriest the closest damaged ally, for leafsprite the closest debuffed ally, for cultists, the nearest ally). Will tinker with that.

Great idea to save and load army loadouts as well. I will try to implement something for the next update.

The all-grey palette will be changed at some point but that's lower on my list of priorities. I'm glad you were able to look past it for now :)

Thanks for playing!