Power Core Defense by jadams

[raw]
made by jadams for LD28 (COMPO)
You're being overrun with giant red ant-like creatures. Hold out as long as you can by building towers to shoot at them. Towers are powered by power cores. And guess what. You only get one!

This means that you can only power one tower at a time. Power is required to do anything: building, shooting, upgrading. As soon as you select a different tower or try to build a new tower the other towers no longer get any power and stop functioning.

The evil ant creatures continue to spawn indefinitely in waves in slowly increasing numbers. Survive as long as you can to get the highest score!

Controls:

> It's all mouse. So you're going to need a mouse.
> You can only build on the lighter blue squares, and towers require a 2x2 space.
> Clicking and holding down the mouse places a tower. Releasing the mouse before this is over loses the progress. This takes power.
> Once a tower has been placed, it then occupies the squares on the map. It then needs to activate before it can fire. This takes power.
> Activated towers will shoot at things in range. This takes power.
> Clicking on a different tower switches power to the clicked tower.
> Towers can be upgraded by pressing the buttons on the lower right portion of the screen. Upgrading takes time and, of course, power.
> Each red ant-thing gives points, and you earn interest on these points based on the health of the core.
> The core is that yellow thing that the red things are trying to get to and damage. When it is destroyed it's game over.

Notes:

Update : 18/12/13 : Fixed bug in tower rendering in some browsers. Should now run in all major browsers.

If I get chance I'll add a better (more visual) tutorial on the website soon. Rather than these notes I'm typing out at the deadline.

I was looking at getting an online leaderboard set up but there just wasn't time. I'd appreciate seeing your scores in the comments.

Thanks for playing!

Ratings

Coolness 60% 3
Overall 2.90 590
Audio 1.33 775
Fun 2.71 603
Graphics 2.58 674
Humor 1.56 758
Innovation 2.97 455
Mood 2.23 835
Theme 3.10 386

Feedback

Jago
17. Dec 2013 · 19:05 UTC
Cool game you've got there. It is very challenging, but I managed quite well even with only a touchpad. Great job!
01rafael
17. Dec 2013 · 19:07 UTC
Too hard gameplay! But idea is cool
Jojo
17. Dec 2013 · 19:12 UTC
Score: 2433 on the second level.
Nice game, but I think it would've been better if the towers could attack multiple enemies at once. Now there isn't much strategy, as long as a tower is max upgraded, it does the same amount of damage no matter what tower you choose, so you can just select the same tower the whole time.
kidder
17. Dec 2013 · 19:47 UTC
Neat variation on the tower defense genre.
wbwelcomeback
17. Dec 2013 · 19:48 UTC
This is stuck on the Loading Screen for me (Safari on Mac)
bach
17. Dec 2013 · 22:27 UTC
Quite challenging! But I like the idea of the power core "switch", gives a nice little twist to what I expected at first.
Katamori
17. Dec 2013 · 22:27 UTC
A little bit hard, but definitely enjoyable.
Switchbreak
18. Dec 2013 · 02:26 UTC
Nice, I got up to 328. It's an interesting idea, but super difficult.
mortl8324
18. Dec 2013 · 02:57 UTC
This was very interesting. I liked how it is pretty easy to pick up, but you have to be quite strategic with prioritising your time if you actually want to do well. In the end, time was the biggest resource, so using any free time was very important. Awesome game.
alexc
18. Dec 2013 · 03:03 UTC
Crashes in Firefox Win 8 64-bit with the JS error:

> IndexSizeError: Index or size is negative or greater than the allowed amount @ http://jadams.me.uk/games/LD28/js/tower.js:258

This happens right after I make a tower. Runs fine in Chrome.
🎤 jadams
18. Dec 2013 · 18:02 UTC
Thanks for the comments everyone. I'll make sure to rate your games in return.

As for the crashes and other issues, the first thing I can say is please try it in Chrome for now. I'll investigate and try to fix problems in other browsers.
🎤 jadams
18. Dec 2013 · 18:20 UTC
Should be fixed now. I've tested it in all major browsers on windows and it appears to work.
sensenmann666
18. Dec 2013 · 18:47 UTC
nice concept and very good execution but very hard imo
d_0o_d
18. Dec 2013 · 18:53 UTC
I think this game is too hard.
atombrot
20. Dec 2013 · 16:04 UTC
Hahaha, I suck at tower defense ;) Greate twist to the usual TDs and nice fit for the theme... I'm not sure if the ants spawn purely random, but if you would make spawn patterns, you could make the game easier first and then increase the difficulty. It's not really for me, but still I felt challenged to try again, when I lost ;)
Jeremias
23. Dec 2013 · 22:54 UTC
Interesting concept. Unfortunately, there are too many ants :D I would change, that upgrading needs power, because this is the main issue I had: if I start upgrading, the ants run through and I loose.
wbwelcomeback
05. Jan 2014 · 14:28 UTC
Thanks for fixing. Nice concept :)
Gareth Jenkins
06. Jan 2014 · 11:35 UTC
Great idea for the tower building thing