The Power of Nature by razveck

[raw]
made by razveck for LD 39 (COMPO)

Nature is powerful. And so are you! But you are doomed to lose your power, and the only way to recover it is by stealing it directly from the source: Nature itself!

Spawn your evil minions, steal Nature's power and protect your domain against Nature's guardians.


Power drains continuously over time. Maintain your power by sending your minions to drain it out of the Nature around you. Summoning minions costs power. The yellow Slime will seek the nearest source of power, while the red Imp will go straight for the strongest source of power. You can protect them with the Devil, which can attack and destroy enemies.

Nature will try to stop you though. Water Spirits replenish the life force of the world and the Guardians will seek out your minions and destroy them.

Balance is important, keep a close eye on the map and the number of each unit. The game will start lagging eventually, as the number of units on the map increases. Playing on "Low" settings is strongly recommended.

The level is procedurally generated. Some runs will be easier than others. If you feel like you're having a hard time, consider restarting the game and trying again.

Have fun!

---Controls---

Camera pan: touch the edge of the screen, arrow keys or Middle Mouse Button and drag

Camera zoom: Mouse Wheel

Summon minions: keys 1, 2 and 3 or click the button on screen

---Updates---

2017/08/01: - Drastically improved performance: decreased the overall poly-count (tree polys decreased by ~90%), decreased the number of trees, decreased the average number of units in play at any one time, optimized some of the code. - Fixed a bug where, if power became negative, you were unable to recover. - Fixed a bug with the interaction between different types of units and the map.

Ratings

Given 7🗳️ 1🗨️

Feedback

TheFlyingKeyboard
01. Aug 2017 · 21:57 UTC
Fun game with unique mechanics.
milano23
02. Aug 2017 · 12:01 UTC
I really like the idea for the game. My main issue is the red minions have to travel so far to get power. I had three going and they could not raise my power at all. Every time they finished consuming nature they would walk to the opposite side of the map. Are they supposed to do that? I enjoyed playing it though. Good Job!
Zelos
02. Aug 2017 · 12:06 UTC
This is a really fun game. The graphics are good and the mechanics are really cool. I only had a few issues with it:
- The red guys seem useless. You're trying to make all of the fields dark anyway, so I don't get why I should waste so much power on them when I can spawn three yellow ones instead. The just kept running around across the entire field and often got killed off.
- The Power bar is waaaaay too big. It takes up like 1/5 of the screen.
- There's no audio, might want to opt out.
- Game loads pretty long and my computer fans start acting up. The more units I build the worse it becomes. I couldn't finish the game because after a while the fps got down to about 2 with so many units on screen.
- Devils just ignore enemies. I don't know why, but the enemies were walking right through my devils and they didn't care.
- You said it's challenging, but I found it extremely easy. I just spawned yellow units for the first few minutes and got a really steady income. Then I made a few devils, because I had enough power to make two every second. And then I spammed yellow ones until the game lagged out.

So, the concept is fine, but it really needs a lot more polish. For a compo entry it's really good though. Great job.
SpaceSparkle
02. Aug 2017 · 12:33 UTC
The concept is very original and likable. I had fun playing the game and managed to survived for about 10 minutes. I wish there was a timer or some kind of high score. A table of how many units you have would also be handy. There seems to be a lot of AI optimizations that could be done. The red minion definitely needs a rework, because he is rather useless. The simple graphics work well for the game. From artistic perspective the only thing missing would be some chilling music in the background.