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A jam submission

The Last ShiftView game page

Survive in an electronics store, where AI bots aim for world domination.
Submitted by Lord Drako (@structFooBar), UGLI Games — 5 hours, 17 minutes before the deadline
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The Last Shift's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Sound#1073.4583.458
Story#1293.2503.250
Theme#1413.8333.833
Music#2103.4173.417
Overall#2963.3753.375
Mechanics#3403.0833.083
Fun#3563.1673.167
Aesthetics#3803.3753.375

Ranked from 24 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

How many people worked on this game in total?
2

Did you use any existing assets? If so, list them below.
Potra font by Alejo Bergmann

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Comments

Submitted(+2)

This is a cool defense game! The art, music, and sound are really good. At first, I wasn't too excited about how there was a significant chance of missing each shot. Then I read the comment about how the accuracy works, and I liked the deep-dive into the math behind it. It made me better appreciate the design decisions you made; they heighten the tension and contribute to the last stand theme. Nice work!

Submitted(+1)

Cool concept and not only the story but mostly the core gameplay loop. Waves from different angles and you have to position your fighters accordingly. Can easily be taken further. More survivors and different survivors would be awesome. Definitely could use some balancing but hey that's game jams for you and also is true for my game.

Thanks!

Submitted

I can't figure out who the survivors are?

Submitted(+1)

It was a great experience playing your game, I enjoyed it!

Submitted(+1)

Really liked the concept and story, the mechanic plays very well, and it looks really good. Nice job on this one!

Submitted(+1)

This game is truly spectacular! The artwork is absolutely stunning, and the mechanics are incredibly polished. It delivers an immersive and exhilarating experience that I thoroughly enjoyed. Fantastic job!

Submitted(+2)

Heya, it was fun :)

Submitted(+1)

I really liked this concept and it was pretty well polished. I personally found the accuracy a bit annoying, since even with 2 accuracy upgrades and 2 reloading speed upgrades my survivors seemed to miss robots more often than not and allowed them through. I think losing due to bad accuracy often feels more frustrating than losing due to something like low fire rate or not enough units, since it is more up to chance, so potentially reducing the inaccuracy and balancing it elsewhere may make it more enjoyable. It still found it pretty fun regardless, just my feelings on it.

Developer (2 edits)

While the game is luckily quite bug free, I actually found one.

Spoiler warning (details on how accuracy and other upgrades work)

The survivors have a base accuracy of 33%. The remaining 67% depend on distance and speed of the bots. (further away/faster = harder to hit) As the bots have minimum speed at the beginning, that means, we are already roughly at 66% hit chance. So depending on how close the bot is, when survivor shoots, the hit chance is somewhere between 66% and 99%.

Never upgrade accuracy would mean, because the bots get faster with each wave, that the hit chance at some point would get as low as 33%, as it cannot get lower than the base accuracy.

So to counter that, the player needs to increase the accuracy. Originally my plan was, that every time the player chooses this upgrade, the accuracy would increase by 0.01. Meaning after one upgrade you are at 34% base accuracy, after 17 upgrades you are at 50%.

So example after 17 upgrades: hit chance = base accuracy (50%) + distance(0-1) * 25% + speed(0-1) * 25% In the most trivial case (only upgrading accuracy 17 times and somehow surviving), the bots at that point would be at a speed giving them a factor auf ~0.5, so the last component would be 12.5%. the only variable is the distance again. so at this point, the hit_chance would be between 62.5% and 87.5%, depending on distance.

as it is more likely, that other upgrade were also necessary, one would reach 50% base accuracy probably at a point, where the speed factor is always 0, meaning the final hit chance would only be between 50% and 75% depending on distance.

but technically, if you increase the accuracy further, you would reach a point, were the survivors always hit, because the base accuracy is so high, that distance and speed don’t matter anymore.

so this was intentional, because even though it is frustrating and unlucky to die from missing shots, it can be countered through the other upgrades. for example reload time starts at 4 seconds, but multiplied by 0.9 (10% decrease) every time the upgrade is taken. at some point the reload time will be faster than the shot animation, which allows the bots to shoot infinitely often, because the magazine size does not matter anymore.

so there are quite some ways to get this to go infinite, but it was supposed to be hard, because lets face it: in round 50 you see nothing you haven’t already seen in round 1. so there needed to be an end to the game and at the time I didn’t want to put a hard end at some round like “gz, you survived 30 rounds. game over” so loosing to faster bots, because they should get missed more often, seemed like a reasonable choice for me.

okay but now to the bug I found: instead of increasing the base accuracy by 0.01, I actually increase it by 0.1 every time. this means that already after 7 accuracy upgrades the hit chance is alway greater than 100%. so if you push for that early game, you should have not much trouble getting an infinite game going.

that being said, almost all my playthroughs go infinite when I playtest with this bug, and as mentioned… there is not much going on later on. the waves take longer. you don’t need to move the survivors. so it’s just choosing an upgrade, clicking on next, repeat.

I did some balancing “fixes”, but I won’t upload them right now, as they were not part of the jam submission and one could argue that my new difficulty is actually more game breaking than the old easiness xD

just some developer story here xD in the future the game will probably get more survivor types, more enemy types, permanently unlockable upgrades for later runs, an actual leaderboard (currently the button is always disabled, because I just hadn’t time to implement one), and the plan was even to add a tutorial, which explains the whole gameplay.

Submitted(+1)

Took me a while to realize it's the guys doing the shooting and not me. Place them in and let them do their thing. Then I advanced through the game. Ah... 

Submitted(+1)

Really liked the setup! The game itself was fun to play, but I wish survivors didn't sometimes both shoot at the same enemy simultaneously, wasting ammo. However, this is mostly me nitpicking.

Developer (1 edit)

This is actually intentional, as that could happen in real life as well. Perfect coordination does not exist.

Also, as sometimes the survivors miss their target, shooting at the same time can hide, when one of them actually missed.

Submitted (1 edit)

Damn! The game has much more depth than I expected. I definitely have to play this game more :)

Developer (1 edit) (+1)

I fear it doesn’t have much more content though. Timely constraints ;) But we’ll see what I can add in the future. A lot of points mentioned by other commenters were actually planned, but needed to be discarded, because I didn’t have the time for it.

Submitted(+1)

unique mechanics and an ai hating story whats not to love.

Submitted(+1)

Interesting approach to tower defense. I should've read the description faster to figure out you can drag and drop. I liked the intro, ai mild pettiness is fun.

Submitted(+1)

Was a neat  tower defense, really enjoyed adding all the upgrades to the survivors and stuff! It would be cool if there was an indication of the progress of the upgrades / reload bars and other UI like that. Thanks for making this!

Submitted(+1)

Simple buy enjoyable. Made me want to make a tower defense myself for some future jam :D
The only thing I would possibly add is some 2x/4x time during the bots attack phase, as an option.

Also it's a second ai taking over related game which is both funny and suprsing :D

Submitted(+1)

Great gob finishing the game. I enjoyed playing it. I thought the story was funny and fit the theme very well.

Submitted(+1)

That was fun! Nice work.

Submitted(+1)

Fun! Wish the little guys were better shots, but I made it to wave 8!

Submitted (1 edit) (+1)

Top-notch music and sounds! Some art style elements and sounds reminded me of BIT.TRIP Runner2. Moving the survivor with the mouse was not immediately obvious.

Developer(+2)

Thanks so much! I really had fun with theming the music :) and I've never done button sounds and all that before, so figuring it out was a blast!

Submitted(+1)

That was a blast. Once I got to the waves at level 20 though I no longer had to move anybody around. Just 2 per side and keep hitting next wave. I finally quit playing around level 35. Great game though.

Submitted(+1)

This was fun, it was not obvious that I needed to drag my survivor to one of the circles. I liked the art style! good job