The Fregstival by Honest Dan
What better way to worship your Frogod than with a Fregstival? Build up your temple to great heights, by organising fregs, food and defensive turrets. Why turrets? Because those blasphemous insects do not respect the Fregs or their God. Fregstival is a grid-placement puzzler crossed with Tower Defence game.
* IMPORTANT: Hover over UI icons for helpful tooltips *
Controls:
- Left-click to place.
- Mouse wheel to rotate.
- Tab to display HP / Turret Radius.
- S to speed up the "Simulation Speed" (when the insects attack)
How to play
Lose Condition: Run out of space or allow a Frogod Shrine to be destroyed
- Place Fregs
- Chain Fregs together, longer chains grant greater score
- Build turrets adjacent to food tables to defend the shrine
- Sacrifice Fregs and Food to protect almighty Frogod
* Note: The following info is available via tooltips in-game *
There are 3 types of piece to place: - FREGS: Placing worshipers gives you points - FOOD: Placing food provides ammunition for the food-propelling turrets - TURRETS: When adjacent to Food, shoots nearby insects.
There are 4 enemy types: - GRUNT: Chooses a random lane, attacking the first target it comes across - GRUNT CAPTAIN: Chooses a lane with a structure in it, attacking the first target it comes across - DRONE: Choose a lane that leads to the shrine, attacking the first target it comes across - DRONE CAPTAIN: Choose a lane that leads to the shrine, attacking only the shrine
Trailer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fdaStVCBr8M
Known Issues:
- Report any bugs / crashes in the comments
Hot Fixes:
- Included Unreal Runtime Prerequisites in the exe
- Fixed crash going when returning to main menu
- Fixed issue where pillars weren't spawning on early levels
- Fixed bug where game instantly ended if you had no room to place a block (instead of reducing shrine health)
- Changed wording of Progress to "Tile Coverage"
- Added x1.0 above speed control setting UI
- Fixed Aspect Ratio for those not playing on 16:9
1.4 Changelog
- Added a Tutorial Popup
- Changed enemy colors to make them distinquishable
| Link | https://honestdan.itch.io/fregstival |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/54/fregstival |
Ratings
| Overall | 68th | 4.185⭐ | 56🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 150th | 3.963⭐ | 56🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 154th | 3.945⭐ | 57🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 248th | 4.1⭐ | 57🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 30th | 4.598⭐ | 58🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 24th | 4.279⭐ | 54🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 152th | 3.808⭐ | 54🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 108th | 4.108⭐ | 53🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 27🗳️ | 43🗨️ |
This was a really neat take on the tower defense genre. At first, I thought it was unsatisfying that you can't always place towers when you want, but I quickly realized that you are supposed to use your food and fregs as shields to protect the temple. The weapons all felt fair; the one that took up nine tiles was very strong, but also took up nine tiles. There were some fun gameplay decisions like how to place your units to maximize fregs in a row, while not leaving your fregs completely unprotected.
I will say that "limited space" felt like it wasn't a huge concern until very suddenly I couldn't place a unit and lost. It's difficult to plan around since you don't know what towers are coming up.
As usual, the game is very polished and charming. The art is very cute, particularly the fregs and the big statue. There were little bits of juice like bouncy hover text, and satisfying sound effects and music. The one potential flavor miss is having tongue-based weaponry like traditional frog-vs-insect combat (then again, these are fregs, not frogs).
Great work all around!
I am glad you realised sacrificing food or fregs is also a strategy. With the limited space, we didn't want to make it too tower heavy because it'd just be a cluster f*ck!
We wanted it to not be hard, but people could take time to really try optimise. Chaining fregs together is the main mechanic for score, whilst sacrificing food tiles is ideal, along with some turrets far enough away to kill enemies before they drop a bomb on the shrine.
Limited space you are right - we do have a mechanic to spawn obstacles (pillars that can't be built on or destroyed) but I think it isn't setup for earlier levels or isn't breaking - the game needs a balance pass. We may hotfix that in to appear in earlier levels so people understand where we were coming from. We also have it coded so the tower can change in size each floor, but in the end we didn't have time to balance to know if it would make the game impossible if it went smaller.
Sorry that you had a sudden death. That is one of the known issues - its meant to warn you for each tile you can't place and reduce health of shrine, but atm it just insta-game overs.
We did speak about the tongues! but our creative mastermind spacey felt that the fregs were there to worship not fight! :D
There are a plenty of small changes that you might consider to do to make players life a bit easier, but we know how time is running out of hands on LD, so I would say this is quite a solid entry. Nice work!
2. The idea of fusing Tetris and tower defence is clever and fits the theme extremely well
3. It plays good, but a little bit counterintuitive without reading instructions
4. Great job, one of the best from you!
@danyclockworker @namnam we are grateful for our artist and frog lover spacey3d!
@tricky-fat-cat thank you, really agree. We had tool tips for the tile types and enemy types on the HUD, but we think many people don't know they exist :D
@erlioniel you can blame me for the long page! I tried to simplify it a bit since your post to not scare other people! Its not overly complex as you said, but we def could improve on explaining a few things to the player :D
@merdeboi thanks for the feedback! We usually make the game too hard, so in this one we thought we'd ramp it up slower... but we missed the mark a bit. Its a bit of a slow ramp, then gets a bit too hard too fast! We are considering making a "hard mode" for post jam where it ramps up faster to make a play session take less than 15 mins!
so I could take another crack at it!
I really liked the gameplay for your LD52 game, and this felt a bit similar, but with that extra spacey3d magic. Definitely a favorite for LD54 so far. :slight_smile:
I felt like the turrets sometime just didn't shoot. Apart from that it was a fun gam!
Thanks for playing and for the feedback!
Concerning the actual game, my biggest critique is that it tries to blend two genres without excelling in any of those. Both the puzzle and TD aspect are okay, but it lacks something (that one mechanic) to blend them together and make it feel coherent and really innovative. It's always interesting to see how blending two genre's together work out though, even if it doesn't quite hit the spot for me, and I'm always curious to see what experiments you lovely peeps will come up with.
**Edit: ez**
**EDIT**
I got to top 5. I tried to go to #8, but all my following runs were cursed with bad rng. So 5 it is.
Here's the VOD on YouTube to watch the gameplay, just skip to your chapter on the video!
https://youtu.be/-eCnQ8GAhN8
But I really liked the game, both the aesthetics and the mechanics :)
Y'all are seriously one of the few teams that are able to make Unreal games that *don't* immediately gobble up my frames in OBS, and for that I must express my sincerest gratitude. :pray:
This is prolly one of my favorites of y'all's to-date. Very nice work!
another hoard of creatures, crafted by spacey to warm our eyes.
another soundtrack, smithed by brainoid to cleanse our souls.
spearheaded by the enormous, buzzing mind of an honest fellow. An honestdan even.
https://youtu.be/M_clUMUNwm0
fan-fucking-tastic. what this group brings to ludum dare is something the world needs. the inspiration we receive from this sets forth a ripple-effect of creation, untraceable and so very, very vibrant~✨
thank you for making this.
Only thing that I was missing was some sort of compass to know which way my next blocks would be facing. Sometimes I would place a turret in one spot thinking it would fit nicely with a food table, but then it turned out the shape was facing an unexpected direction (I probably rotated my camera and lost track of which was North was).
Other than that, solid entry!