Endless Engagement by LDJam user 388782
Check out the web version on itch.io (link at the bottom)
Mini summoning strategy game. Create summoning circles and outwit your rival god, by destroying their holy Donut. Summon wave after wave of minions, until you finally gain the upper hand.
Click the circles to create a summoning circle. Click a summoning circle and click on the ground to make units from that circle move towards it.
Workers are the only units that can capture mana deposits, but warriors can kill the workers, and ruin the deposit for the opponent.
When you click a summoning spot, you can mouse over the buttons for tooltip, with a description on each of the different units.
Font: Josefin_Sans, from Google Fonts
| Itch IO Web version | https://simoncle.itch.io/endlessengagement |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/endless-engagement |
Ratings
| Given | 50🗳️ | 54🗨️ |
Thought that it suited the theme pretty well.
was very fun creating a little army to take over the world with!
some improvements could be made on the artwork but considering the time limits it could have been hard to do much more.
Great work!
Good work!
Regardless, good job!
You could probably make some system that estimates were the action is, but that seems out of game-jam scope
Was a bit hard to maneuver the army.
I struggled with commanding units a bit, they where getting stuck so idk if I where doing something wrong. But I have fun with the game despite that.
Chromium handles it a bit better.
I got something like ~20 fps which was good enough.
The only thing is that the music kept stuttering and I had to mute it (it's good that there is an option to do that).
So it's either my video card issue (it's integrated) or perhaps web builds in most game engines do not perform that well.
I know it's the case with my game engine, its web exports use wasm for execution and its way worse than running a native build (when compiling Go to wasm it becomes single-thread only, which is a bad thing 'cause the game engine itself can't use any form of parallelism).
Btw, which browsers have you tried?
But, yeah, something is going on. Also, seems like the main menu music isn't starting in FireFox
I liked the environment around the arena. Tho I think you could achieve a more unique style with 2D sprites (can be bad, drawn in a few seconds in paint) instead of primitive shapes, especially for the characters.
Still, neat idea and execution
I'm personally fine with simple graphics like this (I love the two grinning faces on the main menu), but shapes/colors still need to contrast sharply and be used consistently to avoid confusion. I might have had an even harder time distinguishing units than most because I'm playing at night with a heavily red-shifted screen.
Constructive thoughts aside though I still had fun. Reminds me a little of my Darwinia/Multiwinia days. I haven't played many strategy games other than those though, which might be why it's hard for me to figure out how to win.
Nice work!
@maggardjosh Yeah, really annoyed that one slipped into the final version. Thought I had squashed it.
Thanks to everyone who have tried out the game, and especially those who left a comment <3
First playthrough notes:
I started out summoning some warriors in the node in front of my donut. The controls clicked very quickly -- I right clicked to set a rally point and sent my warriors to attack. Ahah, take that evil blue donut minions! This bold strategy did not pan out unfortunately as the enemy opted to build defenders in front of their main donut -- a strategy I learned to adopt in my second playthrough.
Once there were more than one of my unit type on the field I started to get very confused about the rally points. I understood that clicking sent my units forward but (and maybe this was because I just played an RTS before trying your game) I didn't know how to direct a certain group of units to a location. Is the rally point global, like all units go there? Is there some way to select groups of them that I missed? Was the rally point local to the current selected node? (After playing three times I understand now it's this last one)
Second playthrough notes:
* Started out with what turned out to be the opening strategy of the AI -- build defenders, then workers to capture the first mana node. I then made warriors to attempt to control he middle. I usually play pretty aggressive in RTS's.
This strategy fell apart when I tried to move my workers to capture the other mana node near my donut. It was made clear to me they need to stay near the node in order to capture it, so I lost the node they had previously captured. This awkward long path was taken advantage of by the enemy and I started to be overwhelmed. Resigned this game gracefully as I knew I was hosed, but now I had a better idea of how to proceed.
Second go around I figured out that clicking on a node you can right click to set a rally point. I think this wasn't clear, even though this is a pretty obvious mechanic in hindsight, because it was the missing usual indicators. Having the selected node + rally point be a different color would have made it more obvious. Having a dashed line point the rally point, though adding visual noise to an otherwise nicely minimalistc art style, would have also made it obvious it's only for that node.
Not sure how I feel about the waiting around at the beginning with the defenders. Maybe the game should start with the node in front of the donut as defenders? I can't imagine NOT wanting defenders right in front of my donut. Lets me make more interesting decisions earlier on -- though maybe that messes with the balancing. It would also protect against bone headed moves like my first game where I made warriors instead of defenders.
Found what I think is a bug. I was touching my scroll wheel and it was counting as right clicking! So I kept accidentally moving the rally point when I touched the scroll wheel.
Also once I pressed worker when I meant to press warrior -- I think in the heat of battle it's too easy to mix up the "w" words. Maybe rename it to fighter?
Third playthrough:
I tried to be more balanced with my strategy, but I was overwhelmed! This game is hard! Going to have to end my time here as there's other games but I really like this one! I think the difficulty may need to be tuned to be easier.
Focused a lot on the gameplay here because it's complex and the main focus. I liked the minimalistic art style -- it helped me stay focused on the gameplay. Music seemed fine, didn't really notice much other noise.
Perfectly usable programmer art, cool little soundtrack. A fun little game :)
I think the one thing to improve would be the user interface and providing some more feedback to the player, e.g. about what type of character will spawn from each summoning circle.
Oh, and I love the title screen :laughing: