Starlock Defense by Tommy Moua

[raw]
made by Tommy Moua for Ludum Dare 54 (JAM)

Starlock Defense is a tower defense game about gathering cheese in space where the towers are capable of deploying and retrieving smaller spacecraft but have limited capacity.Starlock Defense GIF Trimmed.gifStarlock Defense GIF Trimmed 2.gifStarlock Defense GIF Trimmed 3.gifStarlock Defense GIF Trimmed 4.gif

How to Play

Controls: - Left Mouse Button - Select - Right Mouse Button - Deselect

Tower/carrier ships can be bought from the player's base and can buy/contain or sell smaller spacecraft. Each spacecraft will have different roles such as collecting cheese, attacking and slowing down enemies. Towers can be moved around during gameplay and set in different positions.

Note: The cursor for the web GL version doesn't quite match the original size so it may be a little off.

Starlock Defense Screenshot 1.jpgStarlock Defense Screenshot 2.jpg

Ratings

Overall 651th 3.483⭐ 31🧑‍⚖️
Fun 447th 3.569⭐ 31🧑‍⚖️
Innovation 736th 3.155⭐ 31🧑‍⚖️
Theme 1071th 2.672⭐ 31🧑‍⚖️
Humor 878th 2.077⭐ 28🧑‍⚖️
Mood 807th 3.222⭐ 29🧑‍⚖️
Given 56🗳️ 36🗨️

Feedback

Frib
03. Oct 2023 · 17:03 UTC
Nice tower defense! The cursor tip doesn't fully match where it is actually clicking so it took me a few moments to figure out how I could control everything, but after that it worked pretty decently. Wish the game could speed up more, though :D

Gameplay wise I like the idea of movable towers with little drones used for both combat and collecting dropped resources, pretty interesting stuff! Good job!
Areez Memon
03. Oct 2023 · 17:06 UTC
First try I was quite confused what I was supposed to click or shoot with, a clear UI indication to click on the airship beside would have been nice, I couldn't clearly see it either, until I randomly started clicking everything. You have to tell the player what to do, don't they they will assume or know what to do in a game they haven't played before. The difficulty from the start was quite high for a beginner, even you had playtested a few times, you could make first 2 levels easier to get onboarding then increase difficulty slightly, but in this case, it went from 1 difficulty in first level, level 9 difficulty in second level
pixel-fabian
03. Oct 2023 · 17:10 UTC
Sci-fi tower defense, count me in. Needed a moment to figure out, that you first need the bigger transparent ship, which than has the smaller ones.
Mealky
03. Oct 2023 · 17:11 UTC
Wow description is short but the game is really nice to play !!
frederikja163
03. Oct 2023 · 17:12 UTC
Very fun and nice game. At first i was hoping it would just go on forever. At the end it felt a bit repetitive though. I also feel like the beginning was a bit too hard compared to the later levels. I would have liked it if there were no resets and instead you played the same level all the way through the monsters just increased. In order to still have some sense of progression within the game you could lock the small towers behind wave requirements.

Overall very fun and engaging.
LDJam user 0
03. Oct 2023 · 17:27 UTC
Not bad tower defence. Nice job for 3 days!

Advice: better do perfect UI than add content on jams
DrLizard
03. Oct 2023 · 17:41 UTC
nice simple tower defense. I like the idea of the moving turrets, which are unfortunately a bit harder to see.

The gameplay itself got tired quickly, the strength of the towers enough to make it easy to achieve a reliable defense. Map variance was good, too bad there wasn't more enemy variance perhaps just by increasing the number of lives against other much faster enemies creating a contrast between concentrated defense and having to spread out the towers.
Unfinished632
03. Oct 2023 · 18:00 UTC
Really fun game! It even has an FPS counter!
Don Fouts
03. Oct 2023 · 18:33 UTC
This is a really cool take on the tower defense genre. The game was pretty fun once I got the hang of it. Overall nice work!
Alfred Clark
03. Oct 2023 · 19:34 UTC
This is a pretty sweet idea for a tower defense. Deciding whether to keep a carrier in a strong position or move it towards distance asteroids is a great dynamic. Had different usability issues like carriers often not moving when I tell them to :) but of course, limited time for polish. It's impressive that you got such a solid tower defense working in the time given. Great job!
🎤 Tommy Moua
04. Oct 2023 · 00:26 UTC
@alfred-clark Thanks for the feedback. We just noticed that recently with the carriers recently too so we'll be looking into that and other bugs. For your last comment though, part of that result ended up in us not having enough time to make a proper tutorial since we focused too much on getting features in lol. Thank you though :).
Pyrousha
05. Oct 2023 · 07:32 UTC
Pretty neat game! I had a lot of fun just building up a huge army while still trying to balance damage with resource collection. Only thing I noticed was sometimes the ships would get stuck and I would need to spam-click for them to move, but overall good job!!
jukepoks1
05. Oct 2023 · 18:35 UTC
This was really good TD! The fact you can move those ships makes it different. It's like TD and strategy game combined. Not sure how it relates to the theme, but it was fun anyway. :smile:
asfdfdfd
05. Oct 2023 · 20:22 UTC
I feel myself CAPTAIN STARLOCK!
Ackbad
05. Oct 2023 · 20:56 UTC
Generally quite fun with a lot of potential if more content is added. The base station needs some kind of self defense though as otherwise letting even one enemy though quickly leads to them snowballing as you are forced to move a ship to a bad position. Also the sips being transparent is very bad. It is very had to see where they spawn or where they are before you add a fighter to them. Making enemy and fighter stats visible would be nice as well.
🎤 Tommy Moua
05. Oct 2023 · 23:23 UTC
@ackbad Yea about the transparency, initially it was meant to be a stealth type of thing. Even we sometimes had a hard time seeing the ships ourselves, so we'll be messing around with that. The idea was to really make a good decision on where to place towers/carriers but we did think about letting the base attack, which we probably will do to play around with.
itslocaldj
06. Oct 2023 · 16:58 UTC
very nice concept loved it !
LDJam user 372374
06. Oct 2023 · 17:25 UTC
I'm a big fan of TD, and this is a cool implementation! I'm not sure it fits the theme very well but I had a good time!

The control mapping images appear to be swapped? Perhaps I misunderstood - I just left clicked on everything.
LDJam user 377116
08. Oct 2023 · 20:28 UTC
Whoa that is such a cool concept for a tower defense game! I love that you need to optimize the position of the motherships for defense and ressource collection! A new breath of fresh air for the genre! Well done!
Steampowered85
10. Oct 2023 · 16:21 UTC
Yo, heckin great game! Really smooth and I love the tower defence gameplay style with a twist. If you could do a x10 speed that'd be cool too!
quadtree
16. Oct 2023 · 18:43 UTC
Really enjoyed this one, nice job! I was initially a bit confused because the player carriers are transparent and a bit hard to see, but once I figure it out it was pretty nice. If there's one thing I'd add, it'd be tooltips to explain what the different fighters do, although I did manage to figure it out without them.