Exhaust of Earth by Lipsch
This is my first Ludum Dare. I hope you all like it (:

Short Description
This Game is a bit like a Tower Defense Game. Aliens invade your Planet and want to steal your Water. You build Towers and Satellites to kill those Aliens.
Links
* POST JAM is Online as Windows Download! Get it below the original Download at itch.io* * You can play and download the Game here: https://lipsch.itch.io/exhaust-of-earth
- Source Code: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0BpZcqUdh8haTNZeC04YW5WLXM
Used Technologies
- Unity
- Blender
- Gimp
- Bfxr
- Bosca Ceoil [Post-Jam]
My biggest Issue was the balancing.. It might be too hard. But let me know what you think. Hope you all like it (:
Ratings
| Overall | 436th | 2.917⭐ | 38🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 345th | 2.972⭐ | 38🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 352th | 2.917⭐ | 38🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 169th | 3.667⭐ | 38🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 249th | 3.333⭐ | 38🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 333th | 2.571⭐ | 37🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 384th | 2.063⭐ | 34🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 435th | 2.611⭐ | 38🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 33🗳️ | 29🗨️ |
I screwed myself over by placing mines all over the planet to start with :P I should have placed more guns
Normaly it should start after closing the tutorial..
Really like the shrinking sphere of water effect. The different units made sense though i never bothered with the mines. Satellites seemed the most effective thing to go for, or spam the rocket launchers.
One thing that would have helped a lot it some kind of feedback on the range of the weapons.
And you probably couldn't find s good strategy because the game is not well balanced.
Thanks for the Feedback (:
I didnt wrote in the Tutorial that you can zoom with the scroll wheel.. maybe that makes the overview a bit better Thanks for the comment (:
Well done for making this in the compo time limit!
tower defense on a sphere is a gooooooood ideaaaaaaaaaa
congrats on the compo!
As others have said I found it very hard to keep up with the game. The aliens just kept coming from everywhere and I couldn't do enough to repel them.
I like the visuals and the idea is good. It obviously just needs a bit of balancing and a better way to see where aliens are coming from. I found that the perspective made it hard to get an overview of the entire planet.
You might also want to look into the Canvas Scaler component of the Unity Canvas, since you pretty much have to use full screen to make the game playable.
Overall I like it though. Good job.
The graphics were good and while I bumped into a couple of bugs (quitting to the main menu and starting again didn't put my starting $ back up to $1000) it was overall impressive for a compo entry.
The balancing is a little bit off though. The UFO's keep coming all the time, and there's not much I can do because the land turrets fire slowly and the satellites are pretty much a pipedream after the starter money is spent given the slow rate of acquiring money. And I couldn't select the mines, so I never got to use them. Might've been a different tale if I could.
The tutorial could need some work too, because first of all the game shouldn't play in the background while I'm going through the tutorial, and secondly I shouldn't need to see it at the start of every single game.
Outside of that though, it's a really good idea and I enjoyed it. With some balancing, it could be a pretty neat little addictive game.
Congrats on completing your first LD! You also did it with quite a cool entry! Very impressive.
Yeah, if i just had more time for balacing.
I found a big issue in development where a water stealing coroutine got started every frame, instead of once they start stealing.
So after fixing it it was obviously too easy.
And to fix that I made it too hard.. as it looks..
And the UFOs should start while you are reading the tutorial, but a function call is in the Start instead of in another function. Saw that too late..
Thank you all for the Feedback. It is highly appreciated (:
@zelos It is really unplayable if it is not in fullscreen mode. I will take that advice with the Canvas Scaler. Thank you (:
The game was somewhat too hard but it is usually hard to balance the game. Not sure if there is any better strategies or if just placing missiles all over the place is the best way to go but that also gives the game some replay value. Good job!
Congratulations for your first game, it has some good intentions.
- the game difficulty is very high, I was not able to survive more than short time (although yes, I had the exact same problem with my game few Ludum Dares back)
- music, I haven't noticed any. In my opinion that ruins the mood (or maybe this is the problem with volume), but it is music what builds up atmosphere and lacking it makes game somewhat more empty overall
- tutorial, while it is there, the game already runs making it somewhat problematic to follow and still be able to participate in the game
I liked the idea of planet defense and stealing water with actually decreasing water level looked nice. I had some fun and that counts.
Keep up the good work!
This was really cool, but I could not get very far. Satellites are way too weak, I don't know if they're even worth building at all. The spawn rate might be too high, especially from the start, you might want to make it a shallower ramp up.
Thanks for playing my game and recording it. To see a video where my game is played help much to understand how the player plays it. Maybe think out loud, so the developer sees excectly what you're thinking.
Then to the Game.
The scrolling is normaly faster.
I just noticed it was lagging for you.
I don't know if your Pc is so bad :p or if it is just the web version that lags that hard.. For me it worked fluid.
Yeah, I've seen a platform where you can compare scroes with other players. Definitly gonna use this for my next Game.
@zgragselus
I found a great website for creating music after the jam (:
Gonna use it next Time
I just have a Piano but could not record it.
Be prepared for a nice soundtrack on the next game :p
+ Fun game
+ Like the idea
- Very hard
- The towers are to expensive
Heres my to-do List
If any of you thinks thers something missing - tell me instantaneous!
- [X] Music (Background music -> add sound settings in the menu) [3 Hours, Made two Versions]
- [X] Enemy should spawn after completing the Tutorial [1 Minute]
- [X] Rework the Tutorial [5 Minutes]
- [X] BALANCE BALANCE BALANCE [2 Hours, I think it's okay now.. Balancing is not very fun.. ._.]
- [X] Be able to see scores of other people (Probably gonna use Dreamlo) [30 Minutes]
- [X] Fix the towers so they attack the closest enemy..) [Did not seem to have any issues]
- [X] Range visualisation for the towers [30 Minutes]
I dont know if i should mention everyone here. But here are some, which i think would be very interested in the post-jam
@awesome , @fanatrick , @mrerdalural , @zgragselus , @mars
Overall I ran into a lot of the same problems. Some other things:
- Sometimes it felt like my missiles weren't attacking even if there was a UFO right next to them. If I could know which one they were targeting (closest one makes sense) and if I could see that there's a cooldown state.
- Particles are nice but overall end up confusing there the actual weapon/hitbox for the bullets or lasers are. I would try making a clear bullet or laser game object first, and then have the particles augment that/make it even more clear. Right now the particles end up feeling fuzzy. The explosions for the mines work well though.
- UFOs parking side ways on the side of continents feels a bit weird
- Really liked how the water would start draining from the earth! You could probably expand on that if you're doing a post compo and have the earth in different states of degradation just by using different colors and so.
The sound effects are ok, the graphics a bit nice, with a clean look. I don't know if it fits so nicely to the theme, though, but it's still ok.
Try to do some waves to your game, that would build up the difficulty, at the same time giving the player some time intervals to rest a bit and rebuild.
The killing of enemies being the only resource puts a challenge on your balancing: if the player makes a bad choice early on, thus giving the enemies an advantage (which means less kills) then the player enters a spiral of doom, because less kills means less money to build defenses, which means less kills, and so on and so on. This makes the possibility of winning even with a bad start e lot less likely, which may frustrate the player. So maybe putting other source of income may be a good idea.
It's a nice little tower (planet?) defense game. Graphics are nice, the rocket effects are pretty cool. Balance is off, but it's an LD game, it's hard to balance in such as short amount of time
It probably wasn't ideal to start the game while you are still reading the tutorial text tho!
Take a look! (:
Thanks for the feedback!
But the concept is great, a tower defense on a planet is a really smart idea and the realization is also pretty good ! :thumbsup: Really impressive for a compo entry !