GrimTide: Delay the Inevitable by MartinK
A tide of red stuff is creeping towards your base. How long can you hold off it's implacable advance?
GrimTide is a dark, surreal strategy game.
- Build factories on purple squares to generate resources.
- Use proximity mines to protect your factories, and mortars to clear out the red stuff.
- Prevent the red from creating new sources by shooting it's spores out the air with missiles.
- If the worst comes to worst, you always have the nukes.
- Fend off the encroaching wall for as long as you can.


The position of red stuff sources and resource tiles are randomly generated, so no two runs are the same.
Changelog:
- V1.1 disables window resizing.
| Link | https://github.com/Mattline1/LD50 |
| Link | https://github.com/Mattline1/LD50/releases/tag/v1.1 |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/grimtide-delay-the-inevitable |
Ratings
| Given | 6🗳️ | 14🗨️ |
From the feedback I've been getting, I could have done a better job with the UI and UX, seems people are getting confused about how to play.
Overall very nice and well executed entry!
@abdonatioera Having popups to highlight low resources/stockpiles is a good idea. It's on the list for the post-jam version. Thanks for the feedback.
@candlebird Glad you enjoyed the game. Difficulty is definitely hard to judge for Jam games. It randomly generates the grid too, so it can vary based on how lucky your start is.
Cool game. Good job.
I guess we all wanted to match the theme, but I have to admit that forcing the player to always lose made some games in this jam miss some potential. For this game I feel like it would have been nice if you could actually win and build a nice base.
Some other feedback: the UI is very small and hard to read. I found the symbols a bit confusing. Maybe a lot of numbers could be removed from the UI (e.g. the time it takes). Also the grid and some is kind of blurry, not sure if this was intended.
Nice work!
UI is easily the weakest part of the game, I will be re-working that.
One thing that could be very cool - if you keep working on the game - are buildings that continuously shoot the red stuff. Something like turrets. Id also as you said improve the UI as its very cluttered but you seem to have the same impression. Maybe get rid of the "ordering" part so you can just buy things and they have a cooldown afterwards.
Anyway it was fun for a few minutes (i got to 8 on my second try but could have delayed it further with mines spam) good job. nice idea.
That being said, and I can see you've commented on this, but the user interface was, very hard to work with.
Tower defense style games are my thing, but, I stopped playing because it wasn't enjoyable due to UI issues. On my screen the bottom section was partially cut off, and (with 20/20 vision) I was squinting at the screen due to the low contrast. This made the game unenjoyable even though the concept is great and the execution seems very useable. I can't imagine how people with vision issues would find the game.
Other than that the game seems like it would be great and my only sadness is that the UI is so restrictive and, in the span of a jam, it is really hard to get everything down.