Wizard's Bellow by Eigen

[raw]
made by Eigen for LD32 (COMPO)
The King has left the castle leaving the front gate wide open. You are a wizard left in charge. Lacking physical strength you were unable to operate the gate, so your only option is to use your spells on any approaching adversary.

Your voice is a weapon as uttering a mere word will send your opponent towards the sky in bits and pieces!

Your objective is to survive 10 oncoming waves of enemy lemmings. Click on a lemming and choose the appropriate spell. Reverse and stop lemmings to create larger groups to blow to smithereens. Upgrading spells makes them restore faster and have stronger effects.

In the future I would like to add more graphical ways of dispatching the enemies. Lightning strikes, giant crushing finger from the sky, sinkholes etc.

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The post-compo version includes some gameplay tweaks including how certain lemmings respond to certain spells as well as ramping up the general difficulty.

Feedback

Yamzho
19. Apr 2015 路 17:46 UTC
Nice little game. Not sure about the 'Unconventional' weapon as a lot of RPGs have wizards and co. but as long it is fun to play. ;)
馃帳 Eigen
19. Apr 2015 路 19:13 UTC
Thanks! I agree, but all things considered eliminating someone with just a word isn't really that common. No flashy spellcasting or anything, just point at someone and say "you, die".
Pierrec
19. Apr 2015 路 21:41 UTC
It seems I can't rate yet. I'll come back.
I enjoyed it at first, but it gets tedious after a few waves. I didn't really get the "mix & match" idea, except for the explosions.
sanojian
20. Apr 2015 路 12:39 UTC
Really enjoyed this one. So satisfying to blow up those invaders.
SelfTitled
20. Apr 2015 路 18:55 UTC
Fun, tower defense esc sorta game.
Struggled to remember what each spell did (names kinda incohesive).
Upgrading spells feels awkward in a very time sensitive game, maybe a break between waves to upgrade spells would be better.
No music.
Found it awkward to keep track of spell recharging, perhaps have the gui relative to the cursor or have some text appear at the cursor when a spell has finsihed recharging.
Tried and trusted formula, garranteed to be fun.
blob
22. Apr 2015 路 06:37 UTC
That was really cool! Very nice concept of timing and ennemy movement management. Balance was pretty good too, though once you have all the upgrades the game becomes very easy.
Make wave difficulty increase faster and add some other ennemy types maybe ( maybe some ennemy immune to some type of spells?)
Franklin's Ghost
26. Apr 2015 路 14:53 UTC
Interesting variety of spells and did find myself playing for a lot longer then I'd intended which is always a good sign.
panurge
27. Apr 2015 路 17:33 UTC
Neat mechanic, seems simple to start with but there is actually a good deal of strategic depth here once you begin to figure out the best ways to maximise your spell use.

I played for much longer than I'd intended to. Great work!
Snicklodocus
30. Apr 2015 路 02:59 UTC
Loved the gameplay here! You have to be pretty strategic or run out of spells to use. Good job!
VDZ
30. Apr 2015 路 03:29 UTC
I felt this was a rather uninspired defense game with little strategic depth. The only thing you do is reverse/stop enemies to get them close to each other and use the area damage spell to kill them, while taking care of any solo enemies using the default kill spell. This makes the game very repetitive, and the low difficulty ensures you'll be playing for a while unless you quit out of boredom. Most of your time is also spent waiting for spells to recharge, which isn't very interesting.

I gave a 1 for Audio - would give a 0 if possible - as it blatantly violates compo rules. You cannot use Freesound samples in a compo, not even modified; submit to jam if you must use third-party assets.
馃帳 Eigen
30. Apr 2015 路 05:43 UTC
VDZ, I agree. The post compo version does have a couple of tweaks regarding spells and the overall difficulty. Anyway that's a lot of criticism you got there but any tips how to improve? I mean it's easy to just go around and point out flaws.
VDZ
01. May 2015 路 16:48 UTC
@Eigen
I've thought about it, but I couldn't really find any way to significantly improve it without abandoning the core gameplay. I guess position control just isn't an interesting enough mechanic to build a game around, or at the very least it's not my kind of game. (Minor improvements would be stuff like giving bonuses for blowing up many enemies at the same time to reward good performance or placing mines and other delayed attacks to allow better planning, but that still wouldn't fix the main issues.) All I can do is try and put into words why I didn't feel the game was very fun and hope the feedback is useful to you as developer.