The name was my biggest mistake, I really couldn't think of a good one :sweat_smile:

:bulb: IDEA

Every Jam I like to try something different, make a style of game I've never tried to make or perhaps don't really play much and at least attempt at adding something new (that last bit is usually hit & miss :stuckouttongue:). This time I went with Tower Defence games, I've seen a lot made for LD jams (I assume as they don't require a lot of input for there to be a lot of content) but most play like the Tower Defence games you see everywhere, spamming down as many towers as possible usually yields a win, how can I change that up?

I wasn't very convinced from the start that removing the power to place your own towers and instead managing their "power" was going to work but I had literally nothing else and I'd already lost a day from being busy, so I just went with it.

:scroll: DESIGN

I've always believed jam games are better when you can control a moving character and this worked well with my change to the format (I think, I don't really play Tower Defence games...) as I wanted there to be a time cost between turning different towers on and transporting the energy to them. I came up with 3 or 4 varied towers (which I'm going to call traps from now on) and a bunch of enemy designs, they'll just have varied stats, like movement and health, if there's time I can add some bosses.

Got 1 boss in, they heal minions around them.

:pencil: CODE

Usual thing, I'm never good at getting any mechanics down before I've got some form of art style down, which is a pain... But I guess it's just how I work. Managed to get most of the main pieces done, the basic traps and the parents for all the enemies, probably should've worked a little quicker as the last few hours were the crunchiest of crunches. Never really got a proper win/lose condition in ):

:flowerplayingcards: ART

I feel my games look way better the less colours I use, I limited myself to 5 colours this time around, perhaps one day my game will be just a single colour and instead of "playing" the game like some uncultured rabble, you experience it instead. Joking aside, I liked the colour palette I created, rather cute and keeping to an 8x8 and 16x16 sprite size (mostly) I managed to make a rather consistent style, perhaps my best so far.

Still need to look into utilising shaders better, although this I assume would prevent me from packaging to HTML5, which might be an issue as I can't package to Mac.

:musical_note: SOUND

Didn't spend too long working on sound, wish I could've added a bit more length to my music track (it gets quite repetitive) and perhaps a handful more sound FX would've really helped. All in all, need to start leaving more time for this and perhaps testing sounds with multiple types of speakers as one of my sounds is rather painful on the ears (oops :sweat_smile:)

:joystick: OVERALL

Took a bit too long this time to come up with an idea (the entirety of Saturday, I was at a wedding, so I couldn't do anything, but still...) and found it rather difficult to get motivated. I guess I need to start investing in whatever I start making even if I'm not sure it'll work.

Give my game a play and leave a comment and I'll be sure to return the favour :grinning: Cheers!

Game page

Itch page For HTML version.