Keep Them Away ! by SpaceStrawberriesStudio
Keep Them Away
Game by SpaceStrawberriesStudio(Eren Değirmenci, Arda Deniz Kara)
Description You are in a Castle and you have to keep the enemies away with your arrows.They are trying to Destroy the Castle. While playing you collect coins by defeating enemies and you can use coins to buy upgrades (Fire rate , Wall Upgrade , Catapult Upgrade , Catapult Fire Rate)
How To Play
Simply use your Mouse Left Click and shoot an arrow.
If your castle's healt is 0 you lose, you have to retry .You can buy upgrades to defeat enemies.
Development
This was our first Ludum Dare. Everything Except Tilemap and background music created by us.
Tools Unity Aseprite Bfxr
Credits Background music : https://opengameart.org/content/lasso-lady-seamless-loop
Roguelike pack by Kenney Vleugels for Kenney (www.kenney.nl) with help by Lynn Evers (Twitter: @EversLynn)
Ratings
| Overall | 2262th | 2.932⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 2336th | 2.614⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 2500th | 2.205⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 2137th | 3.091⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 2020th | 2.886⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 1066th | 3.182⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 1650th | 2.452⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 2135th | 2.75⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 21🗳️ | 20🗨️ |
The catapult costs are too high. The game gets boring before you can collect money to buy it.
Playability is max average, which is mainly due to the low pace of the game. You could have increased your fire rate per purchase earlier on first buys, and then let it decrease slowly. If there were more shots, more opponents etc., it would be nicer for my time to pass. Look at this in the context of the Defender 2 game (android).
Instead of pointing your opponents directly at the player, you could set them NavMeshAgent (if the game was made in Unity), they would avoid obstacles.
And a flower at the end - shooting 90 degrees from the mouse target. Apparently negative, but it increased the level of difficulty, making the game more interesting.
cheers!
Each wave is quite long. Perhaps, you could make them shorter and more challenging.
There also is a small issue, with the aiming of the arrow (t's 90 degrees off).
Nonetheless, I still had lots of fun on this. With those tweaks, it could be even better ! :)
by the way.. good job on making this and i love the music, it kept me playing :smile:

The only thing I would change is that the fortress has far too much life (or the knights hit not enough), and there never feels like you are in a real danger of loosing (even when there are many many knights around). But that's a minor flaw. Well done! Keep it up!
This being your first game jam though, don't worry too much about it, you'll improve in time. Hope to see you in the next one :)
First - you should actually take the time to prepare your sprites so that they'd face the mouse (and enemies face whatever they heading towards), which was not the case in my playthrough. In Unity, the sprites need to be facing certain direction or need to be rotated inside parent object, which is then rotated via script. Aim would be and feel milion times better had you taken the time to do this.
Also the pacing is very weak. You should never make your game fun by buying upgrades - nobody gonna want to buy them unless they already like playing the game. You should make your game fun without upgrades, and then make it even fun-er with them! The arrows should fly fast from the beginning, the shooting should feel responsive and snappy.
When you get aforesaid right, then try to add some visual feedback - how do I know if I can or cannot shoot right now? By just clicking and seeing what happens? Is there a better way? You don't need to have complex animation, maybe have just two or three frames with ready and recovery poses, or maybe just change the color somehow. Just let the player know, they need to know, it is crucial!
When you done that, focus on enemies - are they fun? Are they ACTUALLY a threat to a player or are they just a cannon fodder? Some enemies can be just cannon fodder, but some need to be actually threatening to the player, otherwise there's no challenge, no preassure. Then you can mix and match enemy types, so that the player actually has to prioritize which one to shoot first, e.g. low threat enemies and high threat enemies.
After you have this kind of game, that is actually fun to play on it's own, then you can ask yourself "what would make this game even more interesting/fun?" Whatever you try and find good you can make as an upgrade. But never put all the fun somwhere in upgrades, nobody is gonna play that far (at least outside of game jams).
BUT!
This was your first jam, and you actually finished a game that has menu, some content, is playable, isn't broken somehow (didn't find anything at least), stuff just works. That is a huge thing and you should be proud of yourselves! You tackled all the different parts of game development and struggled through it and finished your project. Next time you'll be better, faster, smarter. Work on what you did, build on the good, improve the not that good, carry on! See you next jam, looking forward to what you can do next time with all the feedback you got! :)
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/614164278
Besides Unity knowledge base itself, which is more technical, there are plenty of design or both tech and design resources, especially YouTube is full of great stuff, e.g. videos of GDC talks (check also GDC vault, which is paid, but contains full archive of talks) but also other content creators (could recommend Game Makers Toolkit, if you don't know that).
Stuff's just out there, go and get it! And most importantly, try out what you've learnt, do some small projects focused on one simple thing, or expand this one. Grow! KEEP IT ALIVE! :)