Orb of Life by gcttirth

My first every submission for Ludum Dare! Learned a lot, still everything left to learn!
Orb of Life - A combination of Tower Defense and Clicker genre. Summon Orbs with Life energy to prevent negative life energy from depleting your life energy! Sacrifice your life energy to enhance the power of Orbs! Complete 5 waves to Ascend! Each ascension allows you to enhance Orbs but also increases the power of negative energies! Try to see how many waves of negative energy you can outlast!
Play the game on itch.io: https://gcttirth.itch.io/orb-of-life
Google drive folder with literally everything dumped in it: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1XJuSZ6TdGyDBC7h03mTzds6AZie9Jy4p
Will post my detailed experience later, probably :) ANY feedback is appreciated <3
Twitter: @gcttirth
Ratings
| Given | 12🗳️ | 22🗨️ |
I see that you've based it on Brackeys TD tutorial, right?
You've added some cool mechanics, it is fun to play :slight_smile:
I understand that it is meant to be a clicker, but I felt a bit overwhelmed with speed of the enemies and short lifespan of turrets.
I have to complain about lack of pause menu - if you want to pause or exit the game during gameplay it is impossible and annoys a bit.
Overall, as it's your first submission - It's well done, continue with learning! :wink:
Yes! I have been learning to make a TD through Brackeys' tutorial, and felt like Ludum Dare would be a good experience to implement my learnings into it. I plan to make a post about this experience in the future. I wanted to credit him (and a lot of other ppl, I maintain a list) but figured I would do that in a diff post.
Your feedback about the difficulty of the game is on point. Even I haven't been able to get past Ascension 4 in the limited time I have played the game. I had planned to balance out the game a lot more, but it took me a long time to implement the upgrades (which might still be buggy). I had read about keeping the scope "small", but I learned that lesson first-hand now :D
Pause menu!!!! Not going to lie, I completely forgot about it! It should have been fairly easy to make a pause menu with ways to adjust the volume of the effects/music now that I think about it.
Thank you for your feedback. Can't wait to learn a lot and participate in the future gamejams and LDs!

Sounds and music are okay-ish, a little too generic in my opinion.
I personally found myself interested in "Game Feel" lately, maybe you want to read up on that. Bigger bullets, more explosions and particles, hit effects, screen shake, etc.
Those little things do go a long way for the game to feel satisfying.
Feedbacks noted:
1) Give some time to put down orbs. Initially the plan was to make use of the lifespan to use the same orbs for multiple waves, but maybe I can achieve that as well by allowing the player to pause the game to place the orbs?
2) Indicate when the orbs expire. This is something that feels like a must have, yet I missed it because it was "natural" for me :P Noted!
3) Audio. Yeap, definitely my weakest point I would say. Never bothered with music generators or anything but I will learn more about them and hopefully the music and sound effects will be better next time! Audio being high-pitch was def. an issue that even I realized before submitting, but had no idea how to generate other, better audio pieces.
4) Details about the wave. That is also something that was on my "to-do" list, but just didn't make it in time :D Also, the numbers could be tweaked a lot as well. I had plans to display wave information, orb information etc in a way better manner but couldn't find a good UI solution so went with the text lines instead.
5) "Game Feel" - is that the word for what I have been looking for? I feel you on everything you mentioned. I usually considered that as "polish" and is definitely something I plan to improve the most on (along with UI/UX improvements). If anyone has any good resource for these, feel free to notify me!
Again, thanks everyone for the feedback <3