itch.io

Hey, brother. I tried it again, downloaded it, tried with different settings, but it all looks like a black screen.

I will give you a review based on what I could see from screenshots and videos:

Pros:

• Charming low poly art style
• Cool concept, interesting twist on the TD formula
  • The "nuke" dynamic brings a lot of strategization oportunities
    
• Interesting tower selection
• Diverse locations and enemies
• Game has multiple endings
• Cool visual effects

Cons:

• Didn't run on mac (webgl OR native)
• UI seems a bit rough, there are inconsistent designs, colors, and elements

Thank you so much for trying (and even enjoying?) Recolonizer!

First off, I laughed at the "the win sounds like defeat" comment. These things are so subjective, I've gotten all sorts of comments about the sounds but never heard this one before... And indeed, maybe I'll change "Defended" to something else. Brains, man. Sometimes they work in weird ways...

Some comments about the mechanics:

I’m guessing you have to remember how the waves go

They kinda have a pattern, but there's some RNG to keep you on your toes. I'd word it as, "remembering how they go will give you an advantage, but will not guarantee you anything".

I’d generally lose the first try but get it the on the second since I had a better idea what to expect and understood the field better

Exactly my intention – reward attention to detail and learning from mistakes.

About the location system:

For me, the zones didn’t add anything ... I'd rather just pan ... waiting for the pan and losing precious seconds

That hits hard, but I agree. The version I'm cooking after the PJJ feedbacks gives the zones a bit more function (no spoilers), but indeed you put the finger on the biggest issue with the zones – they're too restrictive. I will go back to the whiteboard to allow the freedom to pan between zones and hotkey. It's time for the location system to mature.

I wonder if zooming out but the area is surrounded by fog and the arrows only go to the edge

This one is intentional – only Fort Wright has intense fog, specifically to "nerf" the map view and force you to be lower to the ground, or squint. As for whether this is challenging in a fun way or annoying way, I'm not sure. But I don't see a reason to change it at the moment. And yeah, the arrows are to help you see offscreen. Keeping them onscreen resulted in a bit of visual pollution and gets quite overwhelming (even after making them quite small...), which I wanted to avoid.

Final thoughts:

I'm really happy to hear you enjoyed the granular upgrades, their icons, and the tower synergy! What was your favorite tower combination?

And yes, if you decide to come back, there's quite a few more things to unlock, including harbors that let you have your own ships to collect money / shoot enemies for you. 

You and the other testers have helped me focus my efforts IMMENSELY in this pre-release stage.  Thank you again for playing and taking the time to write your thoughts!!

Best,

FLCB

Definitely an interesting concept; the creatures are completely bizarre and I was completely lost but I enjoyed the card fighting mechanics, even if I didn't really understand who I was fighting or why. I do enjoy the whole cycle of getting paid and managing your finances. The whole bit about needing to pay rent and bills at the end of the day is so dystopian (love it), but also a nice risk-reward mechanic. Who knew neglecting your responsibilities would make you rich enough to stock up on 27 electroshock cards for your next workday.

All the bits about office politics, and workaholic culture are a cherry on top.

Do note that, like my friend in the comment below:

I didn’t play past day 3 because the story didn’t seem to progress, at least not at the start of that day.

Other than the somewhat lack of polish, considering theres a bunch of unused menus, and the names are quite hard to parse (missing translations?), it's a fun turn-based card game that feels like playing pokémon. As much as I feel like it gets a bit repetitive just going between two rooms, it entertained me for quite a bit of time. I wonder how much better this can get if you polish it, and make the art a bit more cohesive. Once there's a proper story is introduced (or a bug preventing it from progressing is fixed) this game will have some great potential.

I enjoyed it! Do you have future plans of expansion?

So I had 5 clones, and I tried to promote each one to a different class. In the first few upgrades they are so similar I didn't notice what was supposed to be different about them from watching them move and interact with the enemies. But nothing a bit of rebalancing wouldn't fix. 

You can make the first few upgrades have a "great" effect, then have them get exponentially more expensive, and diminish their returns (i.e. you pay 10x the price to get 1/10th of the upgrade). That way, in the beginning, you really feel the upgrades stacking, but as you get more advanced, you really need to accumulate points to make them go from doing 1000 damage to 1100 damage. See this article.

But yeah. I was in a bit of a rush so I didn't hover over anything, I was clicking. A LOT. lol Maybe something in the UI to visualize what the upgrade (i.e. 100dmg >> 110dmg) would help communicate it.

IDK about locking the promotion. I think clearly communicating the effect on the clone should be enough. In my opinion you don't want to restrict too much player expression. If I want to promote right away, I should be able to do it and be aware of the tradeoffs.

I like the powerup idea. You could even have a special clone that just collects powerups!

As for the anticipating enemy direction thing, I made a `TargetManager` class for Recolonizer, and it's definitely overkill for your project, but who knows, you might find something in here to improve the targeting of the clones. It's where I wrote the predictive targeting logic (see GetCorrectedTargetPosition). It has quite a few dependencies for some other functionality (such as using physics to shoot a rigidbody projectile perfectly on target), so if you want me to share more just ask.

Good luck on your project!

I am gonna preface this by saying I got pretty addicted to it, and my expectations got pretty high; so I got a bit disappointed as I played. Let me get the compliments out of the way first:

• Classic, killer 8bit soundtrack
• Cute and cohesive pixel art design
• Fun clicker game concept, and good variety of upgrades
• I like being able to press the button to 99% early; rewards proactivity

However, what made me kind of not want to play it anymore was:

• Very slow build up. I wasn't expecting to be doing most of the clicking with 5 upgraded clones, 6 cycles in...
• Clone promotions seem inconsequential? Maybe I didn't go far enough in the levels, but the clones are a bit too stupid and slow to be effective, even after 3-4 speed upgrades.
• A bit more polish in the clone AI would go a long way in bringing satisfaction to the player. And reduce the frustration of seeing 5 clones chasing 1 ghost, right behind it, when they could've intercepted it earlier if they weren't stupid (i.e. make them chase where the ghost will be rather than where it is)
• I find the choice to upgrade the amount of enemies a bit strange. Instead of spending our money on this, the game should increase its difficulty every time you press the button, to encourage player resilience, and fighting till the last second. It would also have the consequence of increasing the amount of rewards each time you start a new cycle.
• While I love the soundtrack, having just 1 loops gets boring pretty fast. Would be nice to have a low-medium-high intensity loops depending on the cycle you are in / number of enemies and so on.

I think you got a solid foundation with a decent amount of polish. Address some of the frustrations, add a bit more variety in ways to interact with the enemies (maybe some turrets? mines? etc.), and enable better automation, and you will have yourself a pretty addictive, cute-looking infinite cookie-clicker game.

Note: I never got to level 61; some of the feedback might not be relevant considering I might've missed content.

First impressions:

• Beautiful and charming hand-made drawings in the main menu
• Nice soundtrack, fits the theme
• Nice abilities, allowing for a huge amount of skill expression (i.e. parkouring on bouncing hats is hard but satisfying to pull off)
• Interesting lore (the little I was able to parse from the very quick text!)

Analysis:

You got yourself a very cool looking platformer with a super nice set of character skills, and huge potential for a fun game. However, repetitive looking areas quickly become confusing to navigate and boring to adventure in. Enemies strike fast and with not much indication, leading to pretty much one way to succeed in combat: strike fast and as far away as possible and then run away. There's not much interplay with the enemies, because allowing them to do anything at all results in punishment to the player, and the enemies seem to have just 1 move. Enemy design seems a bit incoherent. Why am I killing birds? What are the slime blobs?

Platforming mechanics (bouncy hat, dash, ground pound, wall-jump) are pretty solid and incredibly fun. The wide breadth of possibilities is awesome, and lets you navigate the platforming challenges in however you see fit.

Issues/Bugs:

• Controller D-pad doesn't work in menus (need to use stick to navigate, which is unusual)
• I have two sticks - feels weird to have the left one for both walking & aiming, and the right one unused
  • Correction: Feels even weirder to aim the hat with one stick and aim reflect projectiles with another! If you want my opinion here, I'd suggest to keep all aiming on the right stick, and all movement on the left. I kept stumbling over the controls because I kept forgetting which stick served to aim what. And kept foolishly trying to use the right stick for aiming the hat, several minutes into the gameplay... Muscle memory is powerful, remember your players bring baggage from other games; trying to keep things as standard as possible will make your game much more intuitive.
• Text too fast
• "I forgot my hat" message is confusing, it looks like I already have a hat on!
• Typo: "Come find me ... if you are gnome enogh" (should be enough)
• Enemy animations are hard to read. They should have some sort of charge-up, to telegraph the attack, and then a wind-down after the attack misses 
• Unlocked dash but it remains locked in the abilities menu
• Pressing the "start" button on my controller while in the pause menu unpauses the game but the pause menu remains visible on the screen
• Game doesn't pause when showing what was unlocked by the rock, leading to deaths that are impossible to avoid (because you can't see what's attacking you)

Verdict:

You have a solid prototype and good foundations to make a great game. You nailed the design of the protagonist and their abilities. If you put some work into adding more visual variety and polish, and more carefully think about the enemy interactions and solving some of the "jank", you will have yourself a great platformer IMO. For now, the clunkyness is getting in the way of my enjoyment, and every attempt to have fun with the mechanics leads to some frustration with the jank getting in the way. But don't be discouraged! Everything can be solved with patience and iterations; some of these things are hard to nail the first, second, or third time. 

Good luck with the project! Don't hesitate to contact me again if you want me to give it another try in the future, once you've addressed some of these issues.

Best,

FLCB

Thank you so much for the feedback. All are good points, and some of them are things I've been trying to deal with since forever, clearly unsuccessfully... (Camera, I'm looking at you)

Let me respond point by point:

1) Glad you think so!

2) Great suggestion on the arrow pointing off-screen; it's exactly the way I wanted to iterate on the current way to announce enemies (location icons flashing red on bottom corner), which is quite ineffective.

3) Not sure how to deal with this one. I'm gonna have to go back to the drawing board to figure out how to expose more angles without exposing the ship spawn locations or make them too far away. But indeed, the more I relax the camera movement, the more people want to see of the map. Something needs to be done here. I've gotten feedback about people wanting to smoothly transition between locations when the camera is moved toward the neighboring location, or zoomed out beyond the max (to go to the map) and I think it could be a nice solution to help make the camera feel less... awkward.

4) Thank you! Soundtrack was made by this gentleman here, go check him out! And noted, I'll take another look at the mix; you can also turn the audio to your desired level in the settings, and if I didn't fuck up, it should remember it next time you play...

5) Yep. The game over screen... It's definitely quite raw; it's an aspect that remained unchanged since the first prototype, and didn't mature with the rest of the features. I'll take your feedback to heart and address this somehow; no promises on the specifics, or whether it will be more forgiving hahaha

7) Glad you appreciate it. Hope I can take feedback No. 3 into account to capitalize on this grand scale...

Thanks again for taking the time to try it out! Hope you give it another shot again in the future :)

Best,

FLCB

First off, thank you for the compliments, I really appreciate it. 

Very thorough feedback, and incredibly punctual. All of the points highlighted are things I'm aware of and plan on fixing / have tried to fix in the past without success, and need to iterate. Let me give you a point by point:

• Money sfx: There is a sound there, although quite placeholder-ish... But now that I have a soundtrack it disappeared in the mix. We're working on it. I'll do a few more audio passes to update the final version of the soundtrack, and to include more sound effects, as many interactions (hitting ship, building, upgrading, ui navigation, etc) don't have a sound and it's quite jarring.
• Tutorial level difficulty: Ugh. The tutorial level is a bit of a legacy level with quite a few problems that have been accumulating, including the difficulty. I'll do another pass on the tutorial to make it less wordy and introduce the difficulty gradually, maybe even redesign the level? Turtle beach is too exposed indeed, and quite difficult to defend. I'm not quite sure what the long term solution there should be, but on a first look I'll just reduce the number of enemies there / their health and call it a day... In any case, if you want a better difficulty curve, skip the tutorial level and go to level 2 onwards.
• UI panel size: Yep, correct. It was made for mobile first, and my fat thumbs quite like the big panel. It definitely obscures too much and affects gameplay, so I'll work on the accessibility there. Maybe just forcing a zoom-out could address that.
• Zoom reset on switch: Ah, so I didn't fix this one on every map. Normally the zoom resets to most-zoomed-out (not your previous zoom level) when you switch, but I will align all the maps so they have the same behaviour; as you've experienced, some maps still reset to somewhere in between.
• No juice: Mate, I know exactly what you mean. The distraction + multitask difficulty was definitely intentional, but without another core fun mechanic, it becomes a bit pointless. I found quite a few people enjoy the core loop of just build / upgrade / collect enough that they don't notice it, but you are 100% on the money with that feedback. I'll go back to the drawing board to try to find another core mechanic to add to the fun. I wanted to bring in a end-level boss, or maybe a mechanic where you have to finish building something to be able to complete the level, rather than just survive X waves. To be seen!

  
  

  • Note: I just released an update with a new ship that helps you collect money, so there's a game mechanic to reduce this feeling of being overwhelmed via gameplay.

Lastly, let me thank you again for the incredible feedback. You really took the time to think and analyze my choices and mechanics, and I appreciate it a lot!! Hope you give it another chance despite the gratuitous punishment you received in the tutorial...

Best,

FLCB

hahahaha perfectly understandable! That one looks particularly annoying to iron out too…

huh, interesting. Gonna put it on my todo list to read your devlog and play frostpunk (don’t tell anyone I haven’t)….

thank you Mr Gatsby! I have heard negative feedback on the money collection thing, so look forward to a ship that helps you automate that in a future update! The distraction factor is intentional and adds to the pressure but I feel like you should have a way to mitigate it. Thank you for playing!

I absolutely loved the music and SFX, and the NES visuals.

The game itself, while creative and fun, is a bit limited in player expression through gameplay. All in all, solid game, tons of levels (I was kinda shocked when I first booted it up!) and pretty creative board-game-style gameplay.

Bug found: The arrow is not pointing in the right direction under certain marching orders:

Couldn't get it to run properly in the browser on a Macbook (macOS 14.6)

Main menu and all subsequent screens were black, except UI.

When I'm back home I'll download it and give it a try.

Oh, nice, even more kudos then; it's a lot of features for just one person! Also wanted to compliment the whole "reactor" idea – did you get it from Forts, or was it a case of parallel thinking? In my opinion its a great twist on the TD genre.

By the way, I wanted to let you know that as your main "competitor"—only other 3D game with a relatively similar visual aesthetic I've seen while browsing the tower defense category—you are a huge inspiration. I am currently trying to crank out an endless mode too, but you beat me to it...

Looking forward to the future updates!

You guys are really putting in the work! Good stuff :)

Awesome game, great art style, great music. Super simple and cohesive concept, intense gameplay

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Wow! Just found this game while browsing web-based tower defense games, and it looks eerily similar to my 2025 tower defense game recolonizer! i swear i never saw your game until today!!! love the soundtrack, the menu theme is great, and super creative use of the moving towers. 5/5 jam game

Hey y'all, I released a new version of Recolonizer in preparation of the introduction of an Arcade mode. I did a big refactor, which required me to redesign the waves of enemies.

I also met a composer, who made some pretty cool pirate music for the game. The music even changes with the action! You can read more about it in my recent devlog.

Although... I'm not sure if it's too jarring or not. Or if the waves are too easy now. Or too hard?

That's where you come in!

Play Recolonizer at your leisure, and keep observant for two aspects of this game:

• The soundtrack:
  • Is it annoying after extended gameplay?
  • Does its vibe match the vibe of the game?
  • Does it change well between contexts?
  • Do you like it personally?
• The gameplay:
  • Do ships attack predictably?
    • i.e. do you have a good sense when the wave is over and when new enemies will come through?
  • Is the difficulty OK?
  • Do you enjoy the enemy variety?

Looking forward to hearing back from you. If you want to trade reviews, feel free to link your game!

Play Now

First off, I'm happy to hear the feedback was of some use. I do want to point out that 

> the way that you placed the walls, indicates that you are not aware of where the monsters will be arriving from, or how the night is going to pan out

is not a problem in my view. I like the uncertainty, and having to make a decision without clear indications, to then have to adapt it once you get your first incursion of snakes. But then again, I made a game where you have no idea where or when enemies will attack you, so take my perspective with a grain of salt 😆

Hi there! Sorry for the delay. Unfortunately I already found someone to work on my project, but I'll keep you in mind for the next endeavour! Best of luck.

Hey Mr. Polyspice!

Thank you so much for taking the time to play and review Recolonizer! I am happy to hear you enjoyed your experience, and I am thankful for the relevant feedback you provided.

I responded to your comments in more detail in the original thread, so I won't repeat myself here.

I hope that next time you play it, most of your concerns will be dealt with.

Best,

FLC

Regarding your review of Recolonizer:

1. Thank you so much for taking the time! And good to hear you had a decent time with the game. I am watching the video and responding to certain points as I see them!
2. Not sure if it was the case at time of recording, but I added a setting to control camera move speed with the keyboard, which seemed to be too high in your video. But now you can at least control it...
3. The buy-UI fails to update when you get money, but I am pretty sure you can still buy it if you click it... Sorry!
4. Indeed the progression is quite weak at the moment. There's no communication in the UI, and there's no real progress between levels. My upcoming major updates should address this in the next few months: 
   1. Infinite waves: I'll overhaul the wave system to show which wave we're in, whether it's the last wave, and a button to call the next wave. By design, it should be able to procedurally call in waves for a new arcade mode.
   2. A real campaign mode: I'll introduce a real campaign mechanic, where you have your ship which carries your cannons and money, allowing you to bring some of your defenses and cash to the next level, giving a better sense of progression.
   3. The combination of these two should enable an interesting mode where you bring your campaign ship to defend an island on arcade mode, putting your defenses to the test, and increasing replayability.

As for the written feedback:

1. Good to hear the design of the upgrades and cannons + placement locations had the intended effect of promoting strategization!
2. Thanks for the feedback regarding booty collection, I agree 100%, and in fact the booty collection ship is a tower that is not yet in the works, but it's in the pipeline as an idea I want to work on.
3. Good feedback on the positioning of the location selection buttons. Originally the only interaction you could do from the map view was collecting booty, but I accidentally enabled upgrades from there, and liked it, so I kept it.  I'll address this in a future update. 

Thanks again for the review trade, and I hope you come back to Recolonizer at some point! :)

Hey mate, sorry for my slow reply. Things have been quite hectic, but I got around to playing your game. I recorded myself playing, but couldn't voiceover, so I took notes.

I really liked the game, and will definitely follow up at some point to try the further levels, as a tutorial-only gameplay doesn't do it justice. But alas, here are my notes:

Bunny Bunker Feedback:

Main menu

1. Polished UI
2. Nice settings UI

Tutorial:

1. Clear instructions
2. Love the "making new bunnies" particle fx
3. BUG: When we get instructions, the speed shows 3x but it's been reset back to 1x
4. Nice set of buildings to play with
5. Pretty mature (well thought, not too crazy) economic system 
6. Day-night cycle where day = farming sim, night = tower defense is quite fun and engaging
7. Lovely theme music. Didn't make me exhausted from repetition
8. Nice to be able to zoom

Points of attention:

1. NavMeshAgents of the defenders act a bit weird when lumped together. Perhaps the fighters should patrol randomly around the map to avoid clumping up in the bunker.
2. Although I saw them chatting with each other there, so IDK if there's a lore reason for them to just hang out in the middle of the map
3. I had a snake break through my gate and destroy my shit before any of the bunnies did anything about it. Because of fog of war, it was invisible. I couldn't command them to move either, or I wasn't sure how. You can see that in the video. I selected the bunny, then clicked on the location of the enemy. Maybe this is a skill issue.
4. Zoom and pan controls feel a bit loose, like there's a huge ease value on the cinemachine cameras. I personally prefer my camera movement a bit more snappy.
5. Fix the communication on time controls: Value on the UI should reflect actual speed, and changes made to the time scale should come with a sound effect so users are more aware when this value has changed.
6. Rocket says "launch me" even though it has no fuel

All in all, great little builder, cute visuals, cohesive design, well-thought mechanics, and some innovation with genre mixing thrown in.

Excellent game mate!

TESTING QUESTIONS:

Is it predictable?

Yes. To someone who is vaguely familiar with these kinds of games, I quite quickly understood how to interact with the game. However I jumped the gun and started building the rocket before I had fuel, but the tutorial quickly indicated that to me at the "right" time.

Maybe you could change how you emit the tutorial messages to make the fuel message appear when either of these happens first:

• get to the point where the message usually shows up
• build a rocket or anything else that requires fuel

Is it consistent?

Yes, I wasn't caught by surprise by any occurrances.

Does it give instant feedback?

For the most part yes, save for the time control issue I encountered. Perhaps also indicating that a building needs workers more clearly, which is already done by the top UI that lists your workers/builders, and how many are idle (which was 0, predictably); the point is, my building was missing workers because I didn't "make" enough bunnies, but I took a while to realize it, after already assigning workers to it and thinking it would do the trick.

Easy but deep?

Yes, absolutely. When I have more time, I wanna continue playing it to see how far the rabbit hole goes :)

Player automony

Yes, I felt free to build how I wanted, even if the order of buildings was not quite right.

Love the aesthetic. This is as far as I managed to go lol

I was dreaming about making one of those deep simulators, like a cooking one. Maybe could be a fun idea!

Hey, I'm interested in "trading tests"! I need people to test my Recolonizer as well... And though I don't need recordings, I'd appreciate it if you also recorded it, as it's indeed interesting to watch how others play! I'll try to find sometime to test and give feedback this week/end. 

Cheers! And good luck with your project.

What is it with the McLeod's and their generosity with free music?

Jokes aside, I am on an open beta stage with my game Recolonizer, which is set to release in a few months (aiming for mid-2025).

While I have some placeholder sounds and music, I would love to have a proper soundtrack that gives the game a bit of identity as I get to the final stages of polish, maybe even make this soundtrack change with the level state, depending on how much time / budget we can allocate. But I'd go with a simple loop in the meantime to reduce the workload.

For now, I definitely need:

• Theme song for main menu
• Pause song
• UI element sound effects
• 3-5 Level soundtracks (Thematic, so I can repeat them in levels with a similar vibe)
  • In the game you defend against invading empires, so I think each empire should have its own soundtrack

The game is currently not funded, but I can pay you depending on what you want to negotiate.

Plus the graphics are a bit low-poly stylized, so I hope they align with your preference somewhat.

If you're interested in collaborating, hit me up contact@forloopcowboy.com

Hey there Zakkujo! I'm currently working on my tower defense game, Recolonizer. 

Does this game interest you? I've got some audio placeholders but I'll need to do a full audio pass to:

• Add original music
• Improve sound effects and add missing sound effects
• Potentially add a dynamic soundtrack that switches sections based on the number of enemies on the screen

Let me know if the project interests you, and if so I'll contact you to get an estimate of how much it would cost. 

In any case, wish you the best.

Play Recolonizer Now!

Check out my game Recolonizer! A modern twist on the classic tower defense genre.

Release date set to mid-2025, but you can play the open beta now on itch.io!

PLAY NOW

Ah, good. Often complex solutions can be replaced by better design. And indeed, nerding about physics is like 45% of the reason my project even exists lol

Looking forward to future updates!

As per my comment, i haven't downloaded anything from your page 

Graphics look great, mate!

Achei a arte bonitinha! Pena que não tem versão pra browser...

What the fuck is this schizo shit? I love it

I sure as hell am not downloading anything from this page though...

If you made this in Unity, it would be cool if you made a WebGl version so I can play it on my Macbook! 

All-in-all, congrats on releasing your school project!

Played in-browser and worked well. As a fellow browser-game-developer, I feel your pain. There's always unforeseen caveats with porting to WebGL. But also, similar to you, I just upgraded my project to a newer version of Unity and it fixed some weird bugs with the browser version of my game, Recolonizer.

In any case, good luck with your development, your game is really solid, you'll go far!

Jesus christ this thing got me really fucking paranoid. Great job mate. +1

Small feedback, change the colors of your page, the contrast between light blue and neon orange hurts my eyes, I can't even read the devlog lol

Came here from the second devlog! Looking forward to seeing where this goes!