this is a really nice spin on the tower defense genre! i like the added work you have to do just to place turrets. the graphics and sound are great and definitely have a gameboy feel. it would be nice to have some music, but it’s understandable that you didn’t get to that in a game jam. nice job with the tutorial. placing seeds and aiming to hit ants was a bit difficult because the tiles don’t quite align with the player always. i found the tool selection to be a little weird. i think it would have made more sense to me to just cycle through the tools, but your method is probably faster once you get used to it. it also seemed pretty difficult to fend off all of the beetles in the first wave. i got destroyed! i will try to play again soon. overall pretty nicely done!
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Protect The Pumpkin's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Interpretation of the secondary theme | #11 | 4.048 | 4.048 |
| Gameplay | #22 | 3.476 | 3.476 |
| Overall | #35 | 3.429 | 3.429 |
| Graphics | #45 | 3.524 | 3.524 |
| Gameboy Soul | #47 | 3.524 | 3.524 |
| Soundtrack/SFX | #81 | 2.571 | 2.571 |
Ranked from 21 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Comments
Thanks for playing! Yeah, the tool wheel is definitely clunky. I think having to select the tools at all probably isn't even needed, you could probably consolidate all the player actions into contextual actions (press and hold A to dig, tap A next to a plant to water it, etc). Then just have the menu to select seeds. I'm not sure the best way to fix the issue of placing seeds though. Maybe have it lock onto the nearest tilled tile when you have seeds out?
The difficulty is a bit all over the place too lol. It was way too easy for a while, then I fiddled with the numbers a bunch before submission. I think the spot I landed in starts off too hard and has spikes in difficulty that are a too big between waves.
There actually is a "Help" menu on the pause screen that explains all of the plants and tools. Admittedly though the descriptions are very brief, and I've actually just noticed one of them is flat out wrong lol. To your point though I've also added the explanations for the four plants to the bottom of the game's description, not everyone is going to dig through menus to understand basic game mechanics.
Thank you for playing!
Thanks for the feedback! Yeah, I agree with pretty much everything you're saying. It's funny, originally when I was brainstorming and decided on this idea I just assumed I'd have the player control a lot of the game using the mouse. It wasn't until I sat down and started coding that I realized I couldn't do that, so the existing tool wheel seemed like the simplest way to do what I was trying to do while only using the arrow keys. It's definitely clunky though.
In retrospect I could have probably simplified the different tools into contextual actions (Like press and hold to till a tile/dig up a plant, do a short press to water plants, etc) so that you only would need to use the tool wheel to select the seeds. Giving the player a lump sum of money at the end of each wave probably would have helped with your other point.
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