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UNDEFENDED!'s itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Presentation | #5 | 4.350 | 4.350 |
| Fun | #9 | 3.625 | 3.625 |
| Overall | #16 | 3.367 | 3.367 |
| Theme Interpretation | #54 | 2.125 | 2.125 |
Ranked from 40 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
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This is a fun little game, I had trouble finding the theme at first but then I eventually locked myself out of an important part to resupply the towers! So I would say that there's definitely side effects to the tower placement more than usual in other tower defense games. It's not just about the strategic location but also the running distance to resupply and of course leaving a path open.
I had to turn off the music because it became repetitive quickly but I really enjoyed what you have made otherwise, good job!
Really fun! I played for longer than I care to admit, and the thing I enjoyed most was the trade-off between placing more towers vs. ease of getting around the map. The only thing I can really nitpick is that I can't really figure out how it links to side effects.
Thanks!
Yep, there was a conscious decision to not worry about the theme too much. Some other commenter has argued that placing towers makes your defense more powerful but has a side effect of reducing mobility and increased upkeep time as you travel further to refill them. I suppose I could have leaned into that in the game description a bit, but it's a bit of a stretch for me.
Makes sense, and that's a good point! You can definitely be proud of what you've ended up with regardless of that, this is probably the most polished/complete game of the jam that I've played.
Awesome! Loved the atmosphere and music. I will say the only gripe i had with the controls was the player direction. The player is slow to turn in the direction I want it to go, which caused me to get hung up a few times when interacting with items.
Thanks!
It sounds like you're playing with the keyboard, correct? I really need to figure out how to fix the feel of the controls there. I'm currently just treating WASD as a virtual stick and I probably need to be doing something different there. Maybe adding a "walk" or "turn in place" key would help slightly, but I'm not confident about that.
I've toyed with just increasing the rotation speed, and maybe I'll do that slightly, but it seems easy to go too far there. Diagonal movement on keyboard is also faster than intended at the moment which isn't helping.
On a gamepad you can turn in place or move slowly while turning, but on the keyboard it's just sort of full throttle and awkward.
A few other players have suggested having a more "car-like" driving experience where controls are relative to the player's current direction rather than but that just doesn't feel right to me.
I need to go find a game in a similar style that does this well and study it, perhaps.
I do have some small fixes on the way post-jam related to items which should make them more forgiving to grab.
Correct I've been using keyboard. I'll have to give it a try with a gamepad. I think 'turning in place' and then actually moving is a good idea. That way you wont accidently fall to your death when trying to make a 180 turn haha
Very nice game !!! I've enjoyed it. Puzzle mechanic combined with mechanical skills of driving is very nice. LOVE THE MUSIC.
Nice! Cool aesthetic. I liked the movement / air control. It was fun playing something that's sort of the opposite of the auto clicker style tower defense.
Very nice.
Lovely! Just a bit slow gameplay, but amazing otherwise!
Thanks!
I agree that it's a bit slow, especially at the start. There are quite a few factors contributing that I want to improve on post-jam :)
I had a blast. I really liked having to decide between placing towers while making the platforming harder. I actually think this covers the theme - the side-effect of defense is worse mobility.
The controls felt great (was using a pad). The pitch reminds me of Aegis Defenders which I'm yet to play.
Here's a list of nitpicks and/or wishes in no particular order (and some if not most are probably just due to time constraints):
In most cases I don't think jam games are worth post-jam version let alone an actual release, but I'd love to see this go further.
Thank you for the detailed feedback!
You're right that a lot of these issues were on my mind during the jam, but it was down the the wire and corners had to be cut! But there's some good stuff in here.
I wanted players to be able to stash ammo, but until there were multiple ammo types, it didn't seem as important to figure out. I'm still not totally sure how to let players do that without ruining the platforming. Maybe items should not be physics objects?
Preventing players from placing towers on the tile they're standing on is an easy win. I also want to respawn the tower kit if the player falls with it because that can totally ruin the first wave for new players.
I had thought about letting players zoom out to see what's going on, but a very simple minimap might be better. Cool idea. I'll have to think about that some more.
I had to make the time-to-first-wave way longer than feels good to accommodate first-time players and slower PCs. I plan on adding a small tutorial level and preloading pipelines to prevent the potentially huge stutter when the level starts. That should help, but I'll keep "sending the next wave immediately" in mind. I think players should have some time to explore the level before things get going too.
I agree about the towers feeling kinda week. But I think that SFX and an actual laser effect would help a lot with that.
I do plan on some post-jam updates. I've already fixed a small issue with the item colliders -- they are balls and the probe was too high.
Also I am truly sorry for the music. At least it turned out better than Bevy Jam 1. I'm going to find someone who can help me out with that.
Oh, yeah - I wanted to mention that - riding up an ammo pack/jumping on it felt a bit janky too. I'd def prefer them to be just pickups, not collidable items.
I actually quite like the fact the player has to be careful when carrying an item - I thought it was clever that falling down wasn't a game over but still had a cost.
Also low hanging fruit - multiple items can be carried but at the cost of reduced mobility.
Sorry for the back-seat-design - I tend to do that when I really like some idea 😁
Yeah, I think that makes sense as long as I add colliders to the spawn points.
That's totally fair. I think maybe falling far from the tower kit spawn is plenty painful already though. I also had vague plans of a sort of "mario kart lakitu" style animation that happens when you fall off that eats a few more seconds of time though.
I sort of paused that thought when playing through the endgame a bit where it was quite fun to have to do suicide jumps to refill towers.
Not at all -- very happy to be able to talk through some of this stuff with someone. That's a pretty intriguing idea. Just visually I love the idea of the droid carrying a big ol vertical stack of items.
Hey, I played your game on Discord server if you remember!
I really like this game. This would single-handedly be the best entry in this jam for me if it incorporated the theme better. But I understand your decision to focus on polishing the game.
The only nitpick I have is the controls as I said in the stream. It would be better if left/right arrows changed the direction and up/down arrows moved the robot forward/backward towards wherever it's facing.
I think this will be a great game if you continue to develop it after the jam!
Thanks again for playing!
I'm not in these things for the competition so it's easy for me to abandon the theme if the project wants to go elsewhere :).
I agree about the controls. It's much more natural on a gamepad, but those should be probably be treated separately. Early on in the process I attempted something like that with the camera rotating with the player and the behavior when driving backwards was too baffling and I gave up.
I think that good keyboard controls will be a priority post-jam.
I had some trouble on my first playthrough since I grabbed some ammo before building any towers, and I didn’t have anywhere to dump it (although I realized later that I could have just jumped off the edge I guess).
Once I figure that out, I got managed to get to 7 waves on normal, which was fun! I got caught off guard by some enemies sneaking through my early defenses and breezing through my (lack of) second-half cleanup towers. Nice little game!
Thanks! I appreciate the feedback.
The ammo thing is something I realized could be a problem, but was conflicted about how to address it. I am thinking about letting players drop/stash ammo, especially if I add more ammo types. That was a bit too much for the time limit. Either way, some tooltips when you approach items that tell you what it is and how to grab it should help.
Almost one on EXTREME difficulty. Good game, but i dont see the side effects?
Thanks! You're not missing anything with regard to the theme. I chose to prioritize polish over even my bad ideas to shoehorn the theme in.
Very fun game, I loved the voxel art and the music! Definitely a lot of interesting things you can do if you decide to expand this, I really like how the platforming difficulty increased as I filled more of the space with towers, which then made it harder to deliver the ammo. Just managed to beat it on Normal with 1 heart left and completely boxed in on an island with towers.
Thank you!
Awesome genre combo, great execution, lovely graphics! (tiny nitpick feedback: pickup hitboxes could be bigger so you don't need to position the bot quite as precisely)
Thanks for the feedback! I think the keyboard controls especially need a bit more work beyond that. That would be a nice little QoL fix though and I'm not sure why I didn't think of it. I'll make a note!
Really like the voxel art style! Micromanaging the ammo for all of the towers was quite fun, and I like how you have to think strategically about where to place the towers in order to not block yourself in.
Thanks! I wish I had more time to think a little harder about the level design, but on higher difficulty levels it does get a bit interesting!