As mentioned in another comment I just made, I'm still trying to balance between readability and having it obscure things too much.

As mentioned in an earlier reply, I both ran out of time and am not very good at 'juice' in general.

Yeah, I am still having trouble balancing the gui widget size between being "large enough to read" and "not obscuring everything else." I've more than doubled it since the jam period (I doubled the entire thing in Unity, then fiddled with the underlying graphic making it about 30% wider). Still trying to make the move and upgrade buttons stand out more, as well.

Could benefit from a scoring system (a simple timer or distance meter would be enough) just to give me some feedback on how well I was actually doing.

Nice concept though!

True enough, but given where the creeps spawn, it actually takes them a good couple of seconds to get close enough to see. The wave counter in the top right is not even technically accurate (its one-behind what the code's actually doing), and it only looks that way through **sheer coincidence** in timing.

Yeah, sound isn't really my forte and I was dealing with programmatic content all the way up to the deadline. Lots of the "juice" just isn't there. Still, I had fun making it!

That and always sending squares to one player is basically a free pass on that player's lines.

So you would say that you're *not in control* when it comes to color matching? ;)

High score so far is 99.65. Would have been nice to see what my score was, not just my high score, when I died.

This was a rebuild of a 3-day project I did back in 2015 as part of an interviewing process (I got paid a flat $300 at the time).

So a lot of the concepts and ideas carried forward, along with a non-zero amount of code, but as my architecture was different, it did need to be updated, even if some of the math and logic didn't change (this was strictly limited to the modular components and reusable utilities). Definitely have cooler enemy models this time around, though the tower models got less so. Little less variety this time around too, ran out of time.

Models are all free assets off the asset store or hand-built from Unity primitives.

Thanks! It never ended up being a problem I had to deal with (never lost the only diary I made) but it was niggling in the back of my mind as a what-if.

There's a lot of fine detail in this that I absolutely love (just discovered that the back cover--at least in the PDF--has been torn off revealing page 153).

My first run ended earlier today (er, yesterday, its after midnight) and my character's final regret was that he didn't have the books he owned since childhood to keep him company for the interminable eons (prompt 65 saw to that, you have no idea how painful that was). On the flip side, prompt 52 also ended up being *absolutely perfect* for him as well as he saw himself as a guardian of nature.

I think that was supposed to be "check a skill" or "lose a resource."

I did find a similar typo on #34: "Lose a precious Memory or a destroy Resource." ("Destroy" and "a" should be in the other order). I'd also suggest altering the wording so that "precious" applies to the resource as well.

Can't wait to get my physical copy, but in the mean time I've been enjoying myself using the PDF.

I did have a question though:
If diaries are Resources (which means they can be lost) and there are effects that let you recover resources, can you recover a diary? If so, what happens if you have an active diary at the time? Or can you just not make that choice? I'm guessing that you just can't, but I'd appreciate some insight into the intent.

Also, thank you for making me find a way to murder someone via meditation. You know how it goes; you space out for a hundred years, everyone you know dies, and suddenly you have that unquenchable hunger and your only skills are Fishing, Meditating, and Law.

So, basically I found how to win every time (one exception, noted later).

1) Immediately upgrade core, tap it for 6 mana, summon 2 skeletons to serve as token defense (summon more with all available mana to mob heroes).
2) Wait for an earthquake, something about this happening causes you to gain a bunch of meat. This is good, because without this influx it is almost impossible to stockpile enough meat (it expires!?)
3) Spam summoning rats near skeletons to farm them for meat until you have 20
4) Place a poison flower in the tunnel leading to your core
5) Sit back and relax

Every hero ignores the flowers and is susceptible to poisoning--except the final dragonslayer who is immune. Both levels 2 and 3 will end before you ever have the resources for anything else no matter what you do (no joke, just as I got 10 gold to build a chest and a door and plonked them down for building, the level was over), as knights do 8 damage on an attack (skeletons have about 5 hp) and are 100% resistant to skeleton attacks. You'll start seeing knights almost immediately.

Even "big minions" have 15 hp and don't last very long against knights (and as such are completely useless against the dragonslayer). The giant mole lasted about two seconds and got in one attack. Even seven of them all at once did zero damage total. Spiders do ~3 damage each and fire snakes do about 7.

Other issues:

 - Meat rots and/or is consumed by some unexplained process (apparently skeletons eat it? Why?).
 - Skeletons die from poison flower spore
 - Dead fixed-place defenses (spider, thorns) permanently block that cell from ever getting another defense placed in it forever. Can't even build a floor.
 - Plant growth across the dungeon complicates the simple task of "summoning a humandoid minion" to handle things like digging and building.
 - Plant growth overrides wooden floors. AND STONE FLOORS. AAAA.
 - The costs of all things (other than rubble and possibly mana) are so outrageously high that those items may as well not exist. I've never managed to mine a single crystal, have never had more than 20 gold at one time, and meat rots.
 - Heroes level up WAY too fast. Why is the 4th hero that enters my dungeon doing 4 damage per hit and have 15 hp and 2 defense?
 - Floors marked for having something built (or a wall dug) that have plants grow onto them cancel the build/dig action.
 - Ore deposits can have plants grow onto them and there's no way to revert it.
 - If you have zero gold and zero chests you can place a door.

And then it crashed (I was attempting to fast forward while the only hero left was the dragonslayer).

___________________________________________
############################################################################################
FATAL ERROR in
action number 1
of  Step Event2
for object oUnit:

Variable <unknown_object>.<unknown variable>(100564, -2147483648) not set before reading it.
at gml_Object_oUnit_Step_2
############################################################################################
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
stack frame is
gml_Object_oUnit_Step_2 (line -1)
called from - gml_Object_oGameManager_Step_0 (line -1) - <unknown source line>

Having walked around the edge of the map, yeah, that might've done it :D

First time on my way to work I somehow missed a trigger zone and walked off the far end of the street. Restarting I went exploring a bit and managed to find a gap between the buildings wide enough to fit through.

Second day, had trouble locating the lost and found lockers, as the location was called (nearly) the same thing, but was in a different place, than where the telephone lines were and due to how you approach the workstation, it isn't immediately obvious that its there. I also feel like I missed a narrative bit by wandering around the trolley car as it went up the incline (I got one prompt and just about every where else they came in 3s).

Third day the protagonist notes that the workstation is "just ahead" but its actually outside the building you spawn into (i.e. behind a wall).

No problem! I'm sure there's some more things I could extract that make puzzles easier/difficult, but it would take a broader exposure to more puzzles to work out (and the current setup makes that tricky).

I did eventually figure out the sparking, but it took deliberately forcing that one puzzle into different states (specifically ones not related to solving it). I would suggest changing the visuals for the failure state from a radial burst to an arc that causes lightning to jump from the one electrified piece to the other electrified piece indicating that the failure was due to the relationship between the two.

To that, though I'm sure you're aware and take this into account, the different sorts of piece modifiers like that add to puzzle difficulty. And it may be worth investing in creating a hand-designed tutorial puzzle for each of those modifier mechanics and making the algorithm use it at the first point that the modifier would be used. I'm not sure what a tutorial looks like for this particular modifier, as its going to require multiple opening moves whereby BOTH electrified pieces can be moved to touch each other, and both moves look like a path to a solution. Hmm...

Maybe something like this:

The yellow needs to be replaced with a metal square at the destination point of move 2 (as depicted it'll fall into the water; I drew the yellow before realizing this) so that it supports the large green after move 3. Move 3 needs to be made in order to get enough distance across with move 4 (and no other move with the large piece is possible), but move 1 needs to be made to get the brown out of the way first. ANY other move with the brown would result in electrocution or disconnection.

This is really cool, but I think something needs to be done about getting easier puzzles towards the beginning. Also, the numbers before each puzzle and the collectables (yellow things) are never explained. I've only gotten to play with one puzzle with the sparking and it was bare sufficient to explain what that effect did (only one move I was ever able to make was "bad" because of it).

Roughly speaking:

• 1x1 greens are very difficult to work with
• 1xN greens are tricky if they need to move in their thin-dimension direction
• 1x2 browns are very difficult to work with
• Oddly shaped greens are difficult to work with
• Longer distances to cross are more difficult
• Fewer "excess cells" not needed to form the path are can be difficult to work with
• Oblong greens that are aligned perpendicular to the path direction are frustrating to use (relates to point 2)

In general I feel like I can only get about 10 puzzles deep (not counting the tutorial 3). I have almost no opinion on how yellows effect difficulty, as I've seen very few of them. One was oddly shaped, but the only other piece was a 1x2 brown and it was just a matter of moving the brown around to let the yellow rotate as needed. I guess the 1x2s are the most frustrating that I've seen? Maybe its "how many other pieces are there" that makes them worse to work with?

Found a typo on one of the "On Descent Devices" story dialogs:

<space for spoilery>

.

.

.

.

.

.

"

The camera controls need work. 

The kobolds are cute, though.