GMTK Game Jam 2024

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A jam submission

HemoGrowin'View game page

Protect a very small world with very big things.

Submitted by Ladybunne, Larrikin, rajanb — 6 hours, 18 seconds before the deadline

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HemoGrowin''s itch.io page

Results

Criteria	Rank	Score*	Raw Score
Enjoyment	#2855	2.901	3.273
Overall	#3710	2.820	3.182
Creativity	#3758	2.901	3.273
Style	#4179	2.659	3.000

Ranked from 11 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

How does your game fit the theme?
Our tower defence game allows you to resize towers - the bigger the tower, the stronger they are! You can also summon "pools" that shrink or grow enemies, modifying their properties. Plus, the game is set at a very small scale - inside the human body!

Development Time

96 hours

(Optional) Please credit all assets you've used
See description for credits.

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Comments

creampuffspriteSubmitted107 days ago(+1)

I like the idea of a tower defense inside of the human body! I couldn't quite tell if the turrets were themed as such, but I figure that's minor relative to the core mechanics.

The resizing of towers was interesting and I saw that it changed the usual tower defense style, where I had to plan for future turrets that I might want to place nearby. I do wish that the towers showed you their range (as a preview) before you placed them, since especially at first I had no idea how large a given tower's range was. But generally, pretty cool idea and execution!

Submitted

LarrikinDeveloper107 days ago

Haha yeah... we didn't quite get around to theming the towers exactly. Very vague head canon at best, feel free to interpret them as whichever form of virus destroying cell you please. White Blood Cell, Killer T Cell, Macrophage... you name it.

Definitely agreed, if we'd had more time I think having a placement preview would've been top of the list of things to add next .

Erl Moncevial ErnoSubmitted109 days ago(+1)

Pretty cool tower defense, I enjoyed playing it. It has nice gameplay, good visuals, good sounds.

But I have 3 big issues with resize mechanics:
1. Why do you always resize in 2 sides? That makes first towers that you place either all snipers, cause they have big range, or ineffective, cause they are too close to border and you can't resize them.
2. Why can't you sell towers? That would've made first issue non existent and will allow more strategy, cause you will be able to sacrifice some scale to place towers in better places or move them to the end, so you can survive.
3. Pools that makes enemies bigger or smaller are literally useless. I get that they changing enemies but that's so unnecessary. I ended up using them only once to understand what it is and then ignored them till I won. It is neat concept, but in current state it is unusable and I feel like instead of making it you could spend more time balancing the game or making existing mechanics feel better.

Great effort with the game & good luck with your next projects!

Submitted

Jester With A Shotgun

LarrikinDeveloper108 days ago (3 edits)

Love the questions!

1. Because changing the sides independently created problems that, to solve, fell out of scope for the Jam. It creates problems where you have to define where the "center" of a tower is, meaning that you could effectively move the towers by scaling different sides at different times. This is bad because:...

2. Being able to sell or move towers completely trivialises the scaling mechanic. I do think that if we had more time we would've made "how you're meant to place towers" more obvious/accessible to the player, like letting them preview how the tower scales before confirming placement. We experimented with selling towers but it turned the game more into just "Another Tower Defense" rather than leaning into the scaling theme of the Jam. Part of the interest/appeal of the mechanic for us was the puzzle-piece element of trying to fit your towers into awkward shapes.

3. They aren't technically useless but the game as a whole did not have much time for balance or conveying this mechanic as well as we would've liked. The size of enemies directly correlates to their health value, and the Bigcraft you earn (the scaling resource for towers) is directly related to the enemy health at time of death. This would force the player to try and use the big pools to earn more resources against easier waves so that they could successfully scale their towers to do enough damage in the late waves. On the flip side, if the player DIDN'T scale their strength enough, the small pools would work like a panic button where they could weaken enemies (at the cost of earning less scaling resource) if they were being overwhelmed by a wave.

We only had the finished playable product in the last few hours and tried to make sure the game wasn't too hard. Luckily the pools were incredibly simple features to include and so it's not like we lost time including them over balance. We just ran out of time.

thanks for the feedback!

TheEliteDSubmitted109 days ago(+1)

Yay, I love tower defenses! it plays well and I like the resizing of the towers. it makes you strategize and think about every placement you make.

The only thing is I didn't realize I could resize the towers until the middle of the game when I clicked on one of them, maybe put that in the tutorial screen, it's a really fun mechanic.

Submitted

LarrikinDeveloper109 days ago(+1)

Totally fair, it's not immediately apparent and a single line on the help screen probably isn't a clear enough instruction on how to do it.

Glad you enjoyed!

lueegueSubmitted109 days ago(+1)

Uff what an adventure it is to make games that require balances in this meassure for game jams, but honestly amazing approach. What I can say is really good direction is the fact that the core goal makes you FEEL the power. But then power becomes a bit gassy when it's the only req to overpower the system.
Of course with more time this can go into very interesting places!

Submitted

Meat Your Maker

LarrikinDeveloper109 days ago(+1)

ten billion percent. Once everything was finalised we only had a couple of hours for playtesting and balance and erred on the side of making things too easy rather than too difficult, which unfortunately trivialized some of the more interesting mechanics. But also number go up!!!

DrachenhexerSubmitted110 days ago(+1)

really interesting game and I feel like a lot of theorizing on optimal game strategy could be done. Also maybe it's because I didn't get that far, but it felt like there was no real downside to just just scaling up the towers as far a possible.

Submitted

LarrikinDeveloper110 days ago (1 edit)

Yeah, the goal is to scale the towers a bunch! It's probably way too easy to do so. If we had more time to balance and tweak we definitely would've leant more into the economy side of things, making it more difficult to earn the scaling resource and forcing players to use the big/small pools.

But thanks for playing!

MendleTheAplexSubmitted110 days ago

windows defender thinks your game is a virus

Submitted

LarrikinDeveloper110 days ago

That's very strange, hasn't happened on our computers. Maybe just "run anyway"? I assure you it is a tower defense game and not a virus.

BodginsSubmitted111 days ago(+1)

Nothing better than a tower defence game, good fun!

Submitted

soviumSubmitted111 days ago(+1)

Pretty fun idea scaling your turret areas. The art style and sound design was a little out of place. Maybe moving or removing your turrets could also benefit as I did put them so close to the wall that I could not resize them anymore. I also didnt quite understand how to get new turrets. I would have maybe kept with only scaling the enemies or the turrets. Overall it has potential :)

Submitted

Turrets Together

LarrikinDeveloper111 days ago(+1)

hahaha yeah... I am no artist but I cobbled together what I could. "Existent" was the art/sfx brief.

We actually discussed the idea of moving turrets back and forth a lot, but ultimately decided it trivialised the scaling mechanic which we wanted to be the focus.

I agree that it feels bad to be limited by placing towers too close to the path (which is what you do in normal tower defense)

Re tower count, you just get an extra slot every couple of waves.

giorgio-teamrtoSubmitted111 days ago (1 edit) (+1)

Great little tower defense game, and the resizing of the towers really adds an extra dimension to it, well done!

I didn't really understand what the "Embiggen pool" and 'Ensmallen pool" buttons were for, even if I did like the labels.

Would love it if you could check out our game too!

Submitted

LarrikinDeveloper111 days ago (3 edits)

They make pools that change the scale of enemies, affecting their health and speed. You can even shrink enemies down to nothing! (they also do really cool things to the music)

You earn the resource to scale towers (called Bigcraft) based on the enemy health, so bigger enemies reward you more Bigcraft, so you're incentivised to make the enemies more difficult so you can scale your offense faster, but not so unmanageable that you overwhelm yourself.

giorgio-teamrtoSubmitted111 days ago

Oh so that's why the enemies got really big. Now I understand, thanks!