itch.io

Great idea, cute and very good all around! Reminded me of this river-crossing puzzle/problem with a goat, wolf and cabbage.

I had forgotten about the pyramids for a bit because I hadn't seen any and this tetris-ish storage system distracted me by turning into a very full mess of everything trying to eat everything 😄

Chickens and cows trying to eat each other was a bit odd or my two snakes biting each other. Maybe a different and more intelligent system with animals behaving a bit more realistic would have been better. Like predators having more of a hierarchy and moving faster towards prey or animals running away from predators.

Good idea and nice humor!

I feel I didn't have much influence on the outcome since most of the time was purely lost on running around. There wasn't much that I could really do faster with the minigames. I got 135 points on my first try. Maybe I could have prioritized patients and skeletons differently. I'm also not sure about this healing streak and how much I should avoid having skeletons around vs. healing patients.

At the start I ran into this red bag and that made me be like half a meter above the ground the whole time. Air walking doctor 😉

Great idea and visuals!

Could have used more testing and polishing though. Displaying how many minions you have of each would be very helpful. I quickly had only one red minion which made nearly every puzzle impossible and I guess I would have had to restart the whole game. Sometimes blocks got weirdly stuck, like I had two blue minions trying to push a blue block into a hole in a blue path but they just got stuck with the block half in the hole and the minions pushing it against the side of the hole preventing it from falling down further.

Often I didn't really know what I was supposed to do. Maybe try to keep an equal balance of the minion number and balance how many and which I sacrifice. I had a lot of yellow minions when I gave up and only two blue and one red so maybe I messed up somewhere early. This is a bit like a strategy game where an early decision or mistake can give you huge trouble much later and fixing it would require loading a savegame from many hours ago and replaying half the playthrough...

With this "sacrificing them equally" idea and a counter per kind it would be interesting to try again. Just like learning something new in a strategy game and applying it in the next playthrough or next set up of whatever.

Thanks!

Also a longer stun on the enemies would've been nice, I know when they hit your shield they have a stun so you can hit them but I think it's currently too short and especially if there is more than one enemy near you, you can't really use that opportunity all that well to deal damage. It feels like the enemy and the player are on a level playing field which depending on the game could work, but I think for a game like this, the player should be stronger than the enemies, but maybe that's just me.

Everyone has the same health and damage but there are various mechanics trying to help the player: Only two AI's can attack the same target, so you only ever have to fight two enemies. Enemies randomly pick between "attack", "block" and "idle for a short moment" so you might have to wait a bit until either both are stunned at the same time or one is stunned and one idle or something like that. One blocking and one idle or stunned might also work since you getting stunned is also not that long and you might be able to block before another attack is incoming. You might also be able to change your position to get out of reach of one of the two to create a "one is repositioning" and one is idle or stunned so that you can attack.

It's of course all not that well polished and tested. I had to quickly get something semi playable done that was possible in such a short time. There are a ton of options to design a combat system. In my devlog I'm writing about some details and how I introduced the "same target limit", the stunning and the idle phase later to make it easier for the player. At the start enemies would either attack or block all the time and you could get swarmed by a dozen enemies with no chance of really fighting them.

Cute idea and art.

It was hard to see what is supposed to be what and I mostly had recipes that required things I didn't have. Sometimes I could finish one of the two recipes but that was still a full fail I think.

I'm also not sure about the ingredient saving mechanic. Maybe some ingredients are more rare and should be saved instead of ingredients you get all the time but the game doesn't seem to tell you that so you would have to do some RNG analysis first so to say which seams a bit try hard.

Maybe having more recipes with different prices would be nice so that you could try to safe high value ingredients to make (more) high value dishes while you usually always can make at least some of the low value dishes just by the RNG ingredients.

Great idea with the elemental spirits having different effects on the various puzzle objects. Reminded me of the various upgrades/shapes in Super Mario.

I often threw too short or too far. Not sure why we only have one throw and then have to reset. Maybe it would be better to keep the spirit if nothing was hit so that a missed throw is not an instant fail.

The player doesn't move with the platform, I also struggled with that when I tried it once in Unity and couldn't fully solve it.

Good game with nice graphics, effects and audio!

I had some stuttering on web though and didn't fully understand the combat and dash mechanic. Sometimes the character would zip to multiple opponents or those guys that you weirdly rescue by hitting them.

I died twice in the tutorial area until I found out that you can just dash -> attack to kill pretty much everything before it attacks.

Good idea in principle but this could have been much better. With the auto attacking and slow firing speed I didn't have much control over the combat and could only move and aim. The random upgrades are maybe too random, eventually I got "Grenades lvl 1" which was the only useful upgrade but without any control they weren't that useful. The mouse could also set a throwing distance instead of only a direction.

The two choices after each round were sometimes identical and I have no idea what they really impact. What I don't pick turns into zombies, so what? What type of enemy is what type of civilian? Maybe I missed visual hints for that. Some had some kind of blue ring which was some kind of shield I think.

Basically more control over the combat and more explanations would have made this much better. There is a solid foundation.

At the start it took a while for zombies to appear and I though the game was just broken. There were several lag spikes when it loaded assets like music.

We both went for a survivor like "defend the villagers" type of game.

You can stun enemies by letting them hit your block. Otherwise working together with the other villagers helps a lot as you already figured out. Sandwich enemies and either you hit them from behind or let the other villagers attack them when the bandits focus on you. Also only two enemies can attack the same target and they have an "idle" phase where you can attack. So only two enemies can fight you at once and with timing and stunning it should be possible to win. I'm not sure if I tried fully beating the game with the latest changes. You can move (rotate) while blocking to change the direction of your block btw..

I just finished my devlog where I write about the combat details and what was how much work: https://acurna.itch.io/village-defender/devlog/1462716/village-defender-postmort...

The "huge" terrain took actually barely any time. Surprisingly standard grass took a lot of time but otherwise it was mostly new stuff like the combat, AI and the quest system. It was an ambitious project with some things being harder and having more issues than expected but I got nearly everything done so I wouldn't really call it overscoped. I had an end screen in mind and a settings menu which I had no time for but that is about it. Besides improving/fixing things of course.

A good survivor type game with nice effects and fitting audio.

• The controls were quite confusing because they are rotated by 45° so to say. W goes top right instead of just up and so on. In combat I often accidentally walked in totally unintended directions.
• I would prefer if the 1-3 keys would use skills and not just select them.
• It also took me a while to realize that the portal is indicated by a sound to help you find it. Some indicator for the portal and maybe also the power ups outside the combat phase would be nice.
• The continuous health drain confused me at first and I thought I was getting hit by some projectiles or got poisoned or something until I read the description. Showing all controls at once in the main menu is a bit much and hard to remember. It would be better to have a tutorial section where you learn them step by step. The bleed mechanic should also be explained ingame.
• The game basically switches between fight phased and relatively long phases of searching for upgrade and the portal to the next stage. Maybe another case of the game world being unnecessarily big.
• The enemies weren't that much of a threat since you just had to keep your distance and the difficulty just came from you getting swarmed and having to fight with the controls to not walk into the thorns or enemies. A dodging ability, proper melee fighters that don't just damage you by walking into you and maybe additional ranged units would have made this better.

Good idea. At first I didn't read the description and didn't check out all the NPCs so I was just walking around and trying to cheese up the mountain with no sphere... Then I found the moon sphere and went up there without the sun sphere... The platforming seems impossible at times where I couldn't fully make it from one platform to the next and landed a bit below the edge but could "cheese" up onto the platform. Holding space for longer enabled higher jumps which didn't seem to be mentioned anywhere. Instructions could maybe be clearer but that's partially on me. The idea to hint to the spheres with the lights is good, maybe needs to be clearer for people like me 😅

I'm assuming the terrain is so rough is because it uses an 8bit heightmap and not a 16bit one, that could be improved.

Maybe the whole world should be smaller and the platforming to the mountain top be shorter. It takes too much time. When I restarted after reading the description to check all the NPCs and got the sun sphere I didn't want to climb the whole mountain again. I guess we are supposed to throw the light balls into those pyramids guarded by the shooting snowmen.

Is there any control besides moving with arrow left and right and jump with space? Instructions would be really helpful. I kept getting stuck and I'm not sure what to do.

Good idea though and I like these pattern based graphics.

Thanks!

The only issue I found is that holding down the left mouse button drops too many planets too quickly, which can be frustrating... Needed to get used to the mechanic. Also: The "next Piece" does not work all the times? But maybe this is due to the quick dropping of planets... It forces players to carefully tap instead, which slightly interrupts the flow.

At first I had drop only on click but I often wanted to just spam planets especially at the start of a run so I made them drop every 0.3 seconds while holding the mouse button. Maybe it should have been a longer cooldown or be adjustable. Someone else complained about that as well. It actually was only 0.25s before and I already increased it. 

The "next piece" is maybe badly worded and should be "current piece". Someone else mentioned that there is a bit of a confusion. Both the piece in the spawner bubble and the one in the "next piece" UI area are the piece that gets dropped when you press the mouse button.

There have been some complains about pieces being hard to distinguish and I noticed that as well during development and added those outlines and making them thicker and more distinct multiple times. They are all planets from our solar system minus Earth, plus Pluto, plus our moon and plus a white dwarf so making random artificial planets would have deviated from that idea but maybe I should have done that.

I removed Earth because the hard transition between blue water and the land masses created various random shapes so jam rule wise it would have been tricky. I replaced it with a green tinted Mars for a bit but for gameplay reasons decided to remove one piece and picked the questionable Earth / random planet.

I also thought about reducing the sun piece brightness and even did so a bit. Maybe it should have been more but I also would have had to separate materials which would have eaten some time and I just focused on other things first. I thought that not everything in a game has to be super clearly visible and having some overblown brightness might be fine. A bit like other games make it intentionally hard to see in dark or foggy areas.

I actually thought about UI sounds but wasn't sure how long that would take, how to implement that and such. I prioritized other things and this idea as well just didn't make it.

Thanks!

You mean pyramid instead of pentagon 😉

Yeah I also thought about the five pyramids basically forming a box container like in the classical Suika game and thought about replacing that with one of the ideas for the other two game modes which sadly didn't make it. In the devlog you can see pictures of the second game mode where you would have had pyramid pieces in a sphere container and the third container which would have been both sphere and pyramid pieces in an upside down pyramid container.

Thanks!

6595 points sounds like a lot. I never played it that long. I was too busy trying to get two more game modes in... The highscore I go turing testing and posted was 4886 and would have been higher if I wouldn't have tried clicking something in the Unity editor which accidentally dropped a piece at a bad position 😅

One of the reasons for going for a smaller scale game was actually to focus more on polishing but I don't feel I spent that much time on it and tried rushing at least one more game mode in... See the devlog for the two modes that didn't make it. Usually I try learning more things or making or improving systems and pick somewhat ambitious projects but this time I had no time and motivation to do much.

I asked on Discord about textures and textures that don't contain clear shapes are apparently allowed. Originally I had Earth as a planet in it which maybe has some shapes or at least hard transitions between land and water. I replaced it  with a Mars texture with a green tint at some point but for gameplay reasons I ended up removing one piece and picked the potentially problematic Earth.

I tried a lot of different outline colors to try making them as distinct as possible. One big issue is that dark or desaturated ones are super hard to see and finding 9 distinct bright and saturated colors was quite difficult. Maybe I could have picked even better ones or did something else different. More distinct planet textures like Earth would have helped... Ah maybe I should have focused more on distinct colors for otherwise similar looking planets... Sometimes solutions are obvious but you think of them rather late.

I didn't notice any jitters or popping in my testing, maybe there would be settings to fix that.

Did only the outlines touch? Those are actually outside the collider, only the actual planet accurately represents the collider. I should have changed that. I added the outlines later and didn't even think about the colliders not being accurate anymore.

I'm not the only one who made a Suika style game 😄 I already expected that a bit. Maybe I should also have put numbers on my pieces. I tried making them distinct with outlines but maybe that was not distinct enough.

I got 1702 on the first try which was a bit scammed. I had a big chain reaction and I guess one piece center near the limit line was a tiny bit over it for a microsecond before a third of the circles got merged in that big chain reaction making a lot of room again.

Thanks!

Bounce can easily lead to pieces bouncing out of the container and make you loose the game... Maybe a bit would have been fine to have some more dynamic movement.

Thanks!

The game does capture the mouse but I also noticed that it doesn't seem to work properly on a windowed web version. Maybe another weird Unity 6.2 bug, I encountered several...

I already improved piece visibility multiple times by adding those outlines, making them more distinct and thicker several times. It's rather hard to have nice glowing outlines with distinct colors for 9 pieces (the emissive sun and white dwarf don't have one). I tried a lot of different colors.

Thanks!

Yeah I also thought about making the sun pieces less bright and had already made it a bit darker. Maybe it should have been reduced more. I also improved piece visibility multiple times by adding those outlines, making them more distinct and thicker several times.

What exactly was weird about the physics? Seemed fine in my testing. Some things can be tuned of course. I just activated interpolation and increased linear and angular damping.

Yeah those chain reactions when it gets tight are super satisfying 😁

Huh I never accidentally dropped two pieces, feedback from others is always interesting. They drop every 0.3 seconds while holding the mouse button. Maybe there should be a setting for that or a longer cooldown.

Interesting Space Invaders x Tower Defence mix.

There doesn't seem to be anything at stake? As in you can't loose? Maybe it would be better to have the asteroids move downwards and hit some kind of energy shield or a city and you loose when the "health" is gone. Asteroids coming closer would have also fit the "limited space" theme.

Cooldowns seem to recover while the game is paused.

You can use the left/primary mouse button to activate the current action. Or you can use the number keys 1-4 to execute the action on slot 1-4. See the control settings. It's basically like Minecraft and Space Engineers and such where you have a toolbar with various actions, tools or items. You can scroll through them with mouse wheel or Q/E or quick activate with a number key.

Thanks!

Did you try lowering the graphic settings? The grass chunk generation can cause some lagspikes when moving around. Lowering grass distance and density helps.

Thanks!

Or maybe some kind of end goal, building a ship to leave the Island.

That literally is the goal of the game 😉 There are three "buildables": bed, water distiller and sailboat. Building the last "finishes" the game with a message but you can continue playing.

Great graphics, idea, vibe and execution. Reminded me a lot of The Long Dark, both theme wise and visually.

Interestingly I made a survival game and always saw The Long Dark as my biggest inspiration for that genre but I suppose my game is much closer to Stranded Deep.

Did you try lowering the graphic settings?

You can also interact with things with the left mouse button and select the interaction with mouse wheel or Q and E or whatever else you configure. It's like the standard toolbar you have in many games like Minecraft or Space Engineers.

I wasn't sure how else to make interactions since most objects have multiple actions. Some games have rather random buttons or tap vs hold or require equipping a specific tool for a specific action but even then you sometimes still have arbitrary differences between left and right click or click and hold.

I really like the basic idea of craftable weapons and it being a 3D game. But everything was a bit hard to understand  / weird like how you are supposed to make a combination of things and then drag it off screen to the right to turn it into a gun. Often things fell behind the table. Many combinations just gave "burning thing". In one stage I made these super weak pacifier-bees. Other times I just stood somewhere and spammed my whatever bouncing or target seeking bullets until everything died.

The UI was super small on my 4k screen which is rather typical for Godot... Maybe there should be ARPG like stats that show you stats for whatever thing that you created so that you have an idea how strong something is and what it does.

Cool idea and nice 3D graphics. I feel the idea had more potential. Often my ball just bounced somewhere without hitting much. Maybe it would have been better if you could shoot the ball with like an aimable cannon instead of only being able to time when it drops. Or some way to influence the ball movement or other elements. Or have it be like a pinball machine with the controllable pedals. Being able to rotate the elements before placement or afterwards would have been interesting as well.

Nice twist on the platformer genre.

I didn't have to move that many things and I think I just cheesed a lot by just double jumping huge distances. Maybe it shouldn't scroll so fast and have more types of movement, platforming and mouse interaction elements.

Pretty cool idea and interpretation of the theme.

The controls seemed a bit weird. Maybe the "cursor" should just be where you are pointing at instead of being on a plane which you control the height of?

Love the lively movement of the player and various elements and also the tutorial style approach and artsy text elements.

Nice visuals! I made it to wave 7 relatively unscathed but then got pretty much instantly killed by a yellow wall spawning on top of me that happened to move in the same direction and killed me so fast that I couldn't really react fast enough.

I mostly just spammed normal attacks. The special attacks and dashes didn't really seem that necessary. Maybe the game shouldn't be so fast paced, give you more time to think and make the resource draining special attack and dash more useful / required. More of a tactical game about actually managing your resources instead of just hectically dodging and trying to hit enemies.

Did you try lowering the graphic settings?

There is an instructions menu with some help. Look at the crafting menu, building menu and inventory to see what you can do with the collected items. Like you can craft a coconut into two coconut halves which you can eat which reduces some hunger and thirst. You can craft palm leaves into rope, together with collected stones and sticks from the trees you can make a shovel. With that you can dig sand and build a bed for example. Out of eaten (empty) coconut halves and other items you can make a water distiller to turn collected seawater into drinkable water. And so on.

Great idea and art but the controls were a bit tricky with the charged jump in mid air. I got stuck where you had to make a big diagonal jump somehow. Lower gravity to have more time to enter inputs could have also helped.

Also the tutorial hints activating every time you go past them is quite annoying. They could just show up while you are near the spots and disappear when you walk away instead of you having to cancel them every time.

I wasn't the only one who made a twin stick shooter, interesting. This one has actual upgrades though which I had no time for... I like the environmental "traps" you can active.

Interesting concept with a "Jump King" like game but more like a "Wall Grab King". The controls felt often inconsistent with sometimes not being able to diagonally jump up a wall and grab it again.

Thanks! The map basically stays the same but towers, enemies and the decorative ships are placed randomly in certain spawn areas. You can read about that in the devlog: https://acurna.itch.io/operation-alien-ripley/devlog/958686/jamlytics-jam-1-part...

Originally I wanted to make a full map randomizer but had more important things to do first so it stayed at that fixed level. Some things being randomized is still better than everything being always exactly the same. I hate how most games have no randomness at all with NPCs walking on exactly given paths and such.

As already mentioned in other replies better hit indication for enemies and the player was planned and I also thought about making them more visible. I tried glowing eyes but that didn't really help and probably neither would have glowing weapons. I thought about giving them some kind of colorful space suit and even found a model which I maybe could have somehow merged with more time... I also thought about showing damage numbers but that would only make sense if you could influence them in more ways like in an RPG. I also thought about adding some kind of enemy radar or marker. In a previous game I had health bars over enemies but I wanted to keep it more realistic here. Enemies shooting at you surprisingly also didn't seem like such a big issue because you normally can dodge the bullets in time.

Yeah better hit feedback for enemies and for the player are some of my todo list items I didn't have time for anymore. I also wanted to add RPG like stat upgrades so that you can make yourself stronger which would have made enemies only spongy at the start. Maybe I should have changed the balancing.

I think there is actually only one real light: the sun. All others are those fake lights attached to bullets that I wrote about on Discord and in the devlog. Yesterday I tested an improvement to that fake light idea since overlapping lights get so super bright. My new alternative doesn't anymore but is a bit too weak, maybe that can be improved further with harder rendering tricks.

Yeah a lot of enemies at once are difficult. The idea is to only fight with a few at once avoiding drawing more and more into the fight. They will alert nearby aliens when hit and can of course see you. You can also tactically leave health drops for later if they would overfill you at the moment. You can also get behind obstacles like radar towers, ships and the plant barriers to make them loose sight of you.

With the cooldowns of the weapons (1-2 seconds) there is a certain rhythm of dodging (with space) and shooting you can get into to dodge most bullets. Depending on the rhythm of the enemy shots and amount of enemies that might not work that well. I try to make a video of a more or less full playthrough later and post it on Discord as well.

The controller hint is a missed leftover from when I still wanted to add controller support but I never implemented aiming with that marker so I took most buttons out again and remapped the alt buttons to 1-3. Control remapping and proper settings in general would have been nice as well as a bunch of other things. The current settings have various issues. Can't you just enable an English keyboard layout to avoid that common Azerty issue? German here who has that issue to a lesser extend as well.

I'm working on a lot of things right now like a better vegetation renderer to use in future jams. That did eat quite some time. I wrote down so many things to work on... Including settings. Another big time eater was Amplify Shader Editor failing me and me having to redo some things, I could have avoided that by simply changing the shader model to <=3.5 instead of the standard of 4.5 which doesn't work on WebGL... Found that out after the jam.