Holding On by Cubanfrog
A short, atmospheric, narrative-driven tower defense game about getting over a one-sided breakup.
You've been dumped. With each day that passes, you're contacted by friends and family as you continue hanging on to something you've already lost.
Chatting with your friends on the phone is followed by a wave of enemies -- the thoughts and activities that would have you forget about your ex. Choose between placing defenses and letting go of the relationship that's now behind you.
Each wave, you may drag and drop a tower onto an empty space to begin building it, onto an unfinished tower to complete it, or onto a completed tower to upgrade it. Unfinished towers don't fire at enemies. You can also hover over a tower with your cursor, focusing on it to increase its firing rate.
Each time you lose a life, you may place additional towers, but the difficulty increases; the themes and topics represented in your thoughts and chats increase with them.
The game features atmospheric aesthetics, touching topics, and relaxing gameplay for a pleasant playthrough. Ultimately though, the goal is only to let go.
CHANGE LOG
The original jam version without bug fixes can be found as holdingonwin_original.zip.
April 5, 2022
- Adjusted project settings to fix a screen scaling issue in some environments.
- Changed the project window title to the correct one.
- Fixed an issue with an incorrect dialogue box appearing during gameplay.
Ratings
| Overall | 337th | 3.805⭐ | 43🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 1147th | 2.915⭐ | 43🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 576th | 3.427⭐ | 43🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 152th | 4.171⭐ | 43🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 120th | 4.415⭐ | 43🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 116th | 4.049⭐ | 43🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 984th | 2.431⭐ | 38🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 174th | 4.024⭐ | 43🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 40🗳️ | 65🗨️ |
Touching. Nice job ♥
@pandore Thanks for your kind words!
I had no bugs for so far i coups tell.
Resolution whas ok 👌
It works when I unplug the portrait monitor.
I don't know if something is supposed to happen when you lose all your lives, however "nothing" matched prerry well with the goal of letting it go. That's a clever fit for the theme!
It's not a fun game but a good narrative one.
Nice graphics and moodiest game so far!
But the tower defense gameplay is a little wonky. The difficulty ramps up way too quickly for the amount of towers you can place and the new paths that open up are just unfair.
But obviously the tower defense is just part of the experience, and the difficulty does fit the theme and encourage the player to just let go. So as a whole the experience works very well and is surprisingly polished for a jam game.
I like the art style for the cover art. Reminds me of lo-fi girl and made me think we have similar taste in music. If my intuition was right and we have similar music tastes, you might like the music I made for my game (there's two, one for the title screen and one for the main game once you click through and start playing).
Edit: would you consider uploading a playthrough on youtube? I'd love to watch.
Edit: The page seems to have updated with the link now!
It's definitely not too ambitious and that allowed you to really polish the end result. Gameplay wasn't really fun but enjoyable enough to get to the end and convey the message.
Solid overall, congratz !
And thank you for playing and rating The Apocawiz. I really appreciate it.
Might be digging too deep here, but it actually reminds me a lot of what I've read (and experienced) about the concept of mindfulness, with the towers representing avoidance and suppression, while every round there's a button to accept the situation for what it is, even if that feels like "losing the game". Perhaps that was just my take, but regardless, it was quite thought provoking!
I was preparing myself to a more "tragic" end, I'm reassured :)
Great use of the theme
Thank you for also playing my team's game!
The economical use of a single piece of sparsely animated background art really helped to create an unhurried, but sad and isolated atmosphere, and it worked well with the music, so great job on the presentation front. :grin:
The dialogue between the various characters was engaging and I think you did a good job of defining each of their outlooks and quirks, especially given the limited amount of interaction with each one. I wasn't a massive fan of the tower defence gameplay, since it was a bit too simple, but I also don't think that it was supposed to be the main focus of the game either, so that didn't matter all too much to me in the end.
I always think it's a bit weird to say I "enjoyed" a game like this, but I'm certainly glad that I played it, so good work! :smile: