Elementary Evocation by SigmoidDev
Summon waves of elemental spirits to fight enemy towers in a reverse tower defense type game. Gain and lose mana, purchase upgrades and try to defeat the skeleton king! If you win or lose in the first round - too bad, I did NOT balance ANYTHING, so all I can say is good luck! :smile:
Click for most things, pan and zoom or WASD to move camera, Escape (or Q for browser) to exit in-game menus :video_game:
I ran out of time to add music and SFX, so don't worry - your audio isn't broken :sound:
Also, the in-game tutorial got a page cut off (and is hard to read), so: :book:
You must place 'Spirits' using mana. There are 4 types - air (fast), fire (strong), water (healing), and earth (tanky). The only way to regain mana is by damaging the enemy towers, so plan carefully - you lose if you run out. :earth_africa:
Once you have placed enough spirits, click on the gateway to start the wave. The spirits attack automatically, but you can click on a tower to make every spirit target it. The wave will end when you either win (by destroying the castle) or all of your troops are dead. :ghost:
Assuming you don't win, you will then be able to build up another army using the mana regained, however you can also purchase upgrades. Every time you destroy a tower, you gain 1 crystal. In the upgrade menu, you can upgrade one of your 6 stats, each of which grant permanent buffs to either the mana system or to your spirits. :gem:
| Source Code | https://github.com/SigmoidDev/ElementalEvocation |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/elementary-evocation |
Ratings
| Overall | 101th | 3.738⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 111th | 3.643⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 177th | 3.333⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 69th | 4.048⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 10th | 4.452⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 211th | 2.647⭐ | 19🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 165th | 3.375⭐ | 22🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 11🗳️ | 12🗨️ |
I liked the idea of a reverse tower defense and found the game had potential for some strong complexity. I had fun trying to figure out some kind of winning strategy.
To give feedback I'd suggest improving the readability in your UI elements. For example, in the main menu, in the "How to play" section, I thought I was stuck and was trying to click the green bar to progress, unaware the tombstone in the background existed. Similarly, during game play, the surrender button wasn't too clear either and I pressed it without realizing it'd end my run, some kind of warning would do a lot of good.
Also, I did find a bug where I was able to purchase a mana upgrade worth 2 using only 1.
Great work! I'd love to see it updated in the future!
Anyway, great game! I seriously loved all the graphics here - especially the use of tombstones as buttons! The gameplay was pretty cool too, if not very balanced (like pretty much all compo games...) - the max mana upgrade felt broken, and water spirits were so good that I managed to deal most of the damage to the king on wave 1 with 2 of them. Nevertheless, it was still very fun!
One final nitpick - the tutorial auto-progressing made it a bit hard to follow, especially with one page repeating itself. Other than that, awesome entry!
Feedback:
- It was a bit hard to understand how to play even reading the tutorial. Initially getting to a point to place a ghost felt a bit hard as a new player
- It would be great to be able to restart from the building army phase.
- An indicator for how many upgrade points in the army building phase would be nice
- Being able to see your mana without having to select ghost would be nice.
- Seems like there are points where my ghosts will just run past enemies and kill themselves.
- Clicking the surrender flag seems to FORCE you to surrender or quit the game
Overall awesome work though would love to see some updates on it!
I managed to beat it wave 1 with 2 frost skeletons in front and 3 fire in back.
Looks really polished too!
And I absolutely love your puzzle design—the difficulty is spot-on, challenging without being trapping. Your skills are the epitome of mastery, and it's genuinely enviable. Pal, you deserve high praise; I thoroughly enjoy your game and am eager to learn some valuable lessons from you.
Great work!
Overall a great game and congrats on getting such a big project done in only 2 days!