The Hero (...Always Wins) by Link270
Cheaters never prosper, only the good die young, yadda yadda yadda...but most importantly, the hero always wins. Which is unfortunate, considering you're the villain. But you can last as long as possible before your inevitable demise! Spawn troops and towers in this reimagined take on a tower defense game!
Tutorial
This is a spin on a traditional tower defense game. The hero comes from the top and his goal is to make it to your evil lair at the end. To place towers, click anywhere there is an orange highlight when you hover over it, and choose what to place at the bottom of the screen. Blue highlights are for placing barriers on the path. Keep an eye on your influence in the top right. Use that to pay for towers and barricades.
The hero will always respawn (because hero’s do that) and it’s your job to last as long as you can.
Controls: Move with W and S, zoom with scroll wheel or Q and E, use your mouse to select spaces and place units! Units can only be placed when a square is selected and when you have enough influence (Currency in the top right)
Special Considerations: There are some balancing issues, meaning the hero may take a bit longer to overwhelm your defenses.
Credits:
Tanner: Every single piece of art was created by Tanner!
Mitch: All game logic and programming, plus the music. (Single short song was all we had time for)
Skyler: Animations, balancing, and some dialogue.
Tate: All voice acting, including the actual recordings and some of the writing.
Ratings
| Overall | 428th | 3.728⭐ | 59🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 277th | 3.759⭐ | 58🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 659th | 3.345⭐ | 57🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 312th | 3.973⭐ | 58🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 588th | 3.786⭐ | 58🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 255th | 3.809⭐ | 57🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 170th | 3.918⭐ | 57🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 612th | 3.545⭐ | 58🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 79🗳️ | 108🗨️ |
We had animations for the towers and their attacks, however I was having trouble getting them to work due to the way I setup the towers vs the normal NPCs. I’ll get them working in the future. Also we did have plans to add some effects, so you’d be able to see some sort of attack coming off the towers, particles or smoke when things die/respawn, etc. thanks for the feedback!!
Heres the clip if you wanna watch it back :)
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1447330386
I have about 45k coins to spend and way, way more towers down the road which are not required as the hero never get's that far. And then a full area where I haven't built a single tower or anything. If I would build all of that the game would have a duration of several weeks I assume.
Voice Acting is very cool and funny, overall design looks good but could enhance the gameplay with more animations. Hero stepping on spikes or affected by poison areas, hero getting hit by bullets. The things where the description says that they explode could explode with some particles, the hero could visually show his damage with a shader that reveals scars or by spawning arrows in his body, minions could jump on the way.
I know, I know, limited time. My advice would be to go for a way smaller map next time (whatever game you might make in the next jam, most will have a map tho) and use the bonus time for gameplay VFX/Particles/Animations/Balancing.
Nevertheless, I had fun with it, liked it overall and hope to see you all again at the next jam :D
As far as the hero scaling, he should be scaling 1.8 times each death, so you may have had a bug, or you were just really good at the game haha. It's designed so that after about 5-6 deaths he should start to really get powerful and really hard to beat. I do feel our biggest downfall at the moment is the balancing, it takes way more work to balance than we anticipated, so that needs some tweaks for sure. Thanks for the feedback again!
Super fun concept and well execution! Hero/10 stars!
Great work!
After trial and error at some point I understood the game a bit. I liked different towers and buildings and how they work. Rarely you can see towers that send units across whole map. Probably with some time and trying different builds I would be able to stop level 4 hero. A nice surprise for me was a long map, that's something new for me in the genre.
The humorous switch from hero to villain was a nice touch. The hero can't be hated even if he makes me lose the game, not with that quips and HUZZZAAAH :)
Overall good job! :european_castle:
I enjoyed the humor of the game quite a bit, and your models were lovely. I would have appreciated some more transparency of the game mechanics. An ability to read tower abilities while paused, right there in the UI, would really help the on-ramping, letting the player associate it with the UI slots.
Everything needs a bit more turning for sure, but I agree the healer needs the most. We reduced his heal ability to once every three seconds, which is really not enough for later. We want to add some upgrades and things that would help you last long and let it keep being enjoyable.
Thanks again for playing!!
The idea could easily be extended if you'd like to continue working on the game: different heroes with unique capacities, sevaral ways to generate influence, new buildings, upgrades, drawing path in the map, etc.
Good job overall!
The dialogue of the villian is very funny and the TD gameplay feels great. The UI is very self explanatory and the tooltips are helpful. As I stated before I'm not good at TD games and was soon overrun by the hero but I had lots of fun playing :)
Overall a great entry - good job!
Thanks for making this game!
I would like more feedback when hitting the hero.