Jelly Defense by LDP

Survive as long as you can by fending off waves of enemies crusading against your queen!
Place turrets with unique abilities, upgrade your forces and defends your minions who harvest for you! How far will you go before your queen is dethroned?
How to play:
Click and drag the towers wherever you want on the field. Upgrade them in-between rounds with resources.
Turret powers: - Cannon: shoot strong bullet on enemies in the zone - Laser: destroy all surrounding enemies in the zone - Cold tree: slow enemies passing through its zone
Resources are automatically harvested by your minions but disappear if an enemy touch them !
*Windows executable and HTML5 versions are available - prefer the executable for a prettier version ;) *
Known issue: on the Web version, there's an issue on the music loop, making the beats go offtrack, we'll try to send a fixed version soon
A game by Wilko Willame & Thibaut Husson made for the Ludum Dare 50

| Link | https://thibhuss.itch.io/jelly-defense |
| Link | https://ipsio.github.io/JellyDefenseWebGL/ |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/jelly-defense |
Ratings
| Overall | 182th | 3.956⭐ | 47🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 269th | 3.767⭐ | 47🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 510th | 3.489⭐ | 47🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 619th | 3.722⭐ | 47🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 63th | 4.533⭐ | 47🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 211th | 3.881⭐ | 44🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 690th | 2.932⭐ | 46🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 413th | 3.739⭐ | 46🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 62🗳️ | 83🗨️ |
Good concept and execution. With more diversity through gameplay I'm sure the game could by easy ship ! I'm also sure the game would work if you do an android/IOS version !
Nice work !
ps: the sound in the title screen might be a bit too intense for me :D
ps2: I also had to read the description to figure out what the tree does
Another point, we are lacking a feedback on the tower for the upgrade. Even if I know it's may be difficult ot do it in a game jam.
Bug : The end wave bar goes to the middle of the screen for some reason.
Overall, nice entry :)
I really enjoyed the moving-towers mechanic. The game is really fun at the stage it is atm. The art is very cute and the audio helps give a nice feedback for the towers attacks.
I missed the explanation of what the golden jelly does, though
UI on the web build did not scale well though, couldn't see the whole thing.
Really liked visual style of this the music, good job :)
Also, when the game adds and removes layers of sound (most notably the clap) it starts the track off beat. I'm sure this was unintentional though so I won't hold it against you, and if you fixed it back to being on beat it would be fantastic.
The only downside is that there is a strategy that is a bit too strong, maxing the slow turret and the zone turret, putting them in the middle, and just watching all the ennemy coming to kill themselves, while being too slow to pose a threat ^^ Apart from this small thing (that can easily be balanced out), the game is really really good !
I would say to display more of an end screen when the player becomes overrun. In an endless game like this I think it's important to see how far you got through the game as a kind-of score (think it was around round 14 for me).
Got to level 13 but got absolutely overwhelmed by that point :smile: Guess it was *inevitable*.
That said I loved the visuals and the theme worked really well with this type of game!
Really liked that! :) Artstyle was cute and pretty (also loved the cellshading, the details in the background were amazing) and the music was funny.
After level 11 or so I got no more money :( and at a certain point had to basically camp the ice tree and laser at the royal court.
before that my strategy was, the tower defends the palace grounds and the laser goes into battle while the tree serves as a barrier whereever needed :D
a fun, well balanced little game with self explanatory controls! Good job guys!!
The music is fun, and the artwork is fantastic. Nice work!
The only issue I had was that it was incredibly easy for a bunch of rounds, and then suddenly became absolutely impossible. Like it went from consistently spawning two groups of enemies at a time, for like 6 groups in total per round, to constantly spawning groups without end. I think I defeated like 30 groups in a row without the wave ending? And was eventually overwhelmed. Maybe this was a bug?
Anyway, ignoring the balancing this is an otherwise amazing entry. Well done guys :)
Then, in the mid game, it is still technically possible to harvest gems but the enemies are pressing you much harder. Here, you have to essentially try to harvest some gems at the beginning of the round, and then retreat so that all your towers cover the queen.
And then, in the late game, there is no real hope of harvesting more gems, so you get to see how well your previous efforts paid off. This is the point in the game where the "inevitable" part starts to kick in, and it is just a matter of time until you lose. I think this is an especially cool narrative arc because at this point in the game, you will probably buy your last upgrade ever. And that's just kind of cool. The fact that you'll probably never afford another upgrade again is not part of the narrative arc of any usual tower defense game, but it is here.
I made it to round 15, and I might have made it slightly farther if I hadn't lost a bunch of health in one of the early rounds. Either way, it was a super fun arc, and I think every part of the gameplay works really well.
So I think the fact that the towers can all be placed overlapping, but that that strategy is a terrible strategy for a huge part of the game, actually works really well. There are no explicit constraints on what the player can do, only constraints in terms of what kinds of strategies will lose--and the strategies needed to win are constantly changing.
It is especially cool how the towers sort of change roles--at the beginning, the laser tower seems like it is slower at killing enemies, but by the end of the game, it is all-important. In fact, I have to wonder if I would have gotten farther had I only upgraded the laser tower and the ice tower.
Overall though, this is a great entry. Besides the gameplay which I have documented my appreciation of above, the graphics and audio are polished and straightforwardly good. In total this is hands down the best entry I've played so far.
Edit: reading through some of these comments, it seems some other players didn't figure out that you need to protect the gem-things in order to get more gems... I suppose more explicit explanation of the mechanics would probably be an improvement. However, I think my playthrough is evidence that, if the player does know what all the mechanics are, the gameplay loop is very compelling.
Wish there was a tutorial, I did figure out you can drag stuff but not right away. Also it's not obvious right away what each tower does, but you can understand it by watching them, so I guess it's ok.
Stopped at 10 rounds, it was pretty easy and got a bit repetitive. But overal it was a pleasant game.
Good job!
Original twist on a tower defense by letting the player move the towers.
I didn't get what the orange thing was at first, but I figured out that the minions go there and produce coins. A little animation/tween of coins going towards the coin total would have been nice here. I found it a bit weird that you have to wait for it to finish, when you already finished the round.
The game got more interesting around Round 8, when enemies were coming from 3 (and later 4) directions. I died in level 11.