Towerfull by Brainloaf Studio

The King seeks your head, Wizard...
Gaze down from your tower, accrue mana, and summon loyal Gorblets to halt the Knights' advance. Use the power of the orb to summon powerful towers, but be wary, as power takes up space...


Code by Josh Edwards, art & animation by Cosmo Wegman, and music by Friend Hell.
| Link | https://brainloaf.itch.io/towerfull |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/54/towerfull |
Ratings
| Overall | 54th | 4.214⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 44th | 4.196⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 699th | 3.196⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 498th | 3.732⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 104th | 4.375⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 147th | 3.923⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 122th | 3.889⭐ | 29🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 364th | 3.769⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 21🗳️ | 33🗨️ |
From Obama in the kiln
The thing I would improve is to make it more obvious what portals do. I thought each portal produced a certain number of critters, and I just needed to have enough portals to man all my towers. I only learnt how they really worked when I placed a tower late in the first level and saw each portal generate a single critter. So the mechanic is at least somewhat discoverable.

Also I am not sure how the game ends. In each of the levels the king dies and a horde appears, but nothing happens afterwards. Waves come but I seem to be able to defeat them forever. I got to around 100k mana in the first level then deleted a tower to lose.
Each level's main objective is just to kill the king, but we left an endless mode in after the prompt to truly test your setup with increasing speeds & hp values. I feel like finding an infinitely survivable setup could be considered truly 'beating' a level, so well done!
It wasn't clear to me what it meant when a Groblet would be sweating and standing in place though. Does that mean the Groblet is available to do work?
When a Groblet is standing still (and not looking happy) it means it's trying to get to a tower but the enemy path is blocking the way. That's where a bridge comes in handy once it's unlocked!
But I can't lose xD
edit: Oh! Also had the same issue of not exactly realizing what constituted 'winning' a level, but obviously the kind of thing that gets fixed when you're not working to a 72 hour deadline :upside_down:

@alfred-clark appreciate the feedback a ton! refunding towers for their full-cost was something we debated over so we're glad that it worked out. and we'd love to clarify the mechanics of our little Gorblets & the "win" state in any future iteration!
@its-capp holy shrimp this is the first i've seen of this... it'd be really helpful if you could tell us how you did it!

I do really enjoy it tho!
hot damn this was a good time, there was just something about this game that really clicked with me... and it made a lot of sense when I read what @animatrix1490 said about this feeling like a classic newgrounds title!
Really impressive job you guys did here, and in such a short amount of time too.
Absolutely loved the cute art style, together with the audio it created such a nice cohesive atmosphere and mood.
The take on tower defence was refreshing, especially with the concept of summoning small minions to man the different "towers". (One thing that added a unique flavour was naming the minions)
Considering it was made for a jam, I was genuinely impressed by how complete the game felt, very polished experience.
It was also nice to see that the game fit the theme even better than normal TD games. Usually I find that you keep upgrading towers instead of selling them, but here it was essential to sell off buildings to make room for better ones.
Overall a great entry! :smile: