This was really great! I had a lot of fun getting to know the NPCs, I will say that the tower defense kind of just becomes background once you play for it a bit because it doesn't seem to get harder. The music was sweet, it reminded me of RuneScape music from back in the day lol. Overall really good job and I'd love to see future iterations.

Thank you @suess! We're definitely looking into fixing the balancing for the TD part.

Very impressive first effort, and a cool game. The NPC art was excellent.

Well done!

You've done a good job, I really liked the combo of genres, it was fun but the tower defense part indeed becomes less important for you to pay attention after you place some of the towers.

Would be great if there were some actions in the TD part of the game that would influence the relations with the characters.

Haha. By far this is the most "incompatible genre" game that I've played on LD41 :) Nicely done! It actually requires a bit of concentrating skills to get used to. Playing 2 games at once... fascinating. The dialogs are written with a good humor, and I loved the shape of the map :) Well done pals!

That's an interesting mix of tower defense and sim-dating. At first it is really hectic but after while it stabilizes and you can pretty much exclusively focus on dating aspect of the game. I like how different 'enemies' need different approaches to 'conquer their hearts', also it's pretty humorous concepts. =

This are very two incompatible genres :laughing: good job! but its too difficult :smile:

Haha super fun!! I like both genres so it was really entertaining. :) Once I got a handle on what towers to place, the tower defense game became pretty easy- but re-balanced, I'd play this game all the time. Great job guys!!

I'm curious-- what were all the roles people played in your team?

Thank you everybody for your comments! @Bobo Games Jeffrey worked on the minion sprites, Nathan provided all the music, Dan made the romanceable character drawings as well as our end scenes and then some code to boot, Hannah wrote the dialogue (with really mild help from me in the starting scene) and made the sprites that Jeffrey didn't, and then Donald and I were the team programmers. He worked on the tower defense part and I created the dialogue system that we used.

Greg, Adam, and Melanie acted as mentors to us throughout, giving us lots of encouragement and pointers about how to actually add music, the ways Unity works, and art tips and tricks. We absolutely could not have done this without them.

For some reason the towers I placed never killed anyone. Not sure if that's a bug or not.

@SeaHam that's really unfortunate. What system/browser are you running? Also, which towers?

@tg1397 Chrome from a MacBook. Both the cannon and the flame towers didn't seem to do anything. Not sure if it's a bug or not, it looked like the cannon tower kept missing. Does it only hit specific types of enemies?

@SeaHam It should hit all the enemies. Both do a slight amount of blast radius, so really they're not great for beginning game. In future updates, we'd like to have them be unlockable instead - we might buff them as well.

Funny for sure! The TD part is hard the first few enemies (wish I used a fast tower somewhere) but once you have ten cannon towers in a row nothing gets past. The wizard dialogue repeated once she had already retreated her forces, might be a small bug? Are you guys making more VNs?

im using chrome on windows, and the dudes are booking it so fast the bullets never hit anyone lol

what browser should I use?

@alphazeba I've been using firefox mostly, though I don't know why the browser change would cause that error :/

@willowblade Yep! That's a known bug, probably going to update it out this weekend at some point. And at this point no, there's not a plan to make another VN.

@willowblade We've been joking about making the sequel, where you have to live in the castle with all four of them at once :D that probably won't actually happen, but personally I'm definitely very interested in VN as a genre and will likely experiment with making some in the future.

@Hannah19 That'd be cool to see! Love the profile picture ;)

I totally won this game even tho I suck at both tower defence games and dating sims. This might explain my love life. Thanks for making this amazing game!

first try: i forget this is a tower defense game

second try: DPS fast tower to start and then fire tower in entrance is over kill

so now am i a bisexual royalty having a diplomatic love quadrangle

I won
supper cool idea I loved it. While It could use some more polish it was over all very fun. good job :)

Aw yeah


I was about to call it quits when the dialogue started looping (I think Allison called off her armies three times and repeated that same part about "knowing my history", and that egotistical guy told me twice that I wasn't worth his time or something) but just as I did, I beat it. :stuck_out_tongue:

Also, some of the text goes outside of its textbox.


There are some neat ideas going on here. For instance, I love that the path is heart shaped; not only does it tie in with the dating sim portion but it also gives a lot of possible spaces for tower placement, especially since the people will walk around the tower multiple times. The designs of the characters were very cool, and the humourous moments did get me sometimes. That hex pun though. :laughing: Also I couldn't help but feel kind of sad since you know that while you're seducing all these wizards and knights, etc., TONS of people are just dying on that path. :rofl:

When I first played, I thought I had to answer the dialogue quickly all while making sure the people weren't getting to my tower and it was a lot to kind of take in at once. I guess it's nice that the two parts of the game were going on simultaneously, but I ended up not really concentrating on the dialogue at first because I was under the impression that I had to rush.

The music was very medieval-y, which is fitting enough for the game. I noticed that it kind of loops weird on the Credits screen? Like, I heard the title theme play its intro, then it suddenly replayed the intro after about five seconds in before doing the whole loop. It's not a huge deal, but did stick out. Also, while the portraits are well done, I would have liked to see the rest of the art in the game more or less match that style. There seems to be a lot of different art styles at work here and they don't quite mesh well together as a whole.

As for the visual novel part, it was probably the strongest aspect of the game. I enjoyed talking to the characters and I liked their different personalities. I also liked the possible answers and how some of them felt natural to the flow of dialogue. Storywise, I kept wondering if all these people were just standing around, waiting for their turn to seduce you or you them and why they didn't intervene with each other constantly. Haha, maybe there was just some dialogue I missed. XD

Funny game! I included it in my Ludum Dare 41 compilation video series, if you’d like to take a look. :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7llm9eTY4YI

@Tikikala Your last sentence about sums it up!
@Random-storykeeper Thank you so much for your detailed analysis! As a follow up question - if we were to implement a level system for the TD, do you think that it would be best to have the dialogue in between the two levels rather than at the same time?
@Jupiter_Hadley Thank you so much! Your comments in the video are definitely good to consider.

@tg1397 You know, it's really only frantic for the first few runs, maybe even the first attempt when you don't realize that you can go through the dating sim part on your own time. I think it would be more intuitive if the dialogue did happen between the levels rather than at the same time as the dating sim, but I wouldn't mind seeing comments from the other characters pop up that don't require an interaction. :P

@Random-storykeeper Makes sense. Also - the looping lover dialogue is indeed a known issue, but the dismissal dialogue is meant to repeat. It's a way to signal the player that you've annoyed the character and they're leaving. Sorry that wasn't clear!

The two genres you chose are super clever! For a while i couldn't understand what i was doing, probably mostly because of a lack of feedback when attacking enemies. I didn't know my towers were actually dealing damage. Otherwise i really liked the aspect of social gameplay overlayed as being a goal, since normal tower defense games don't necessarily have a goal, they're usually endless or stopped at an arbitrary point. So good job!

haha really funny dialog.
First time I played it I took my time and lost really quickly, I'll have to act faster and see if I can beat it :D

BTW Love the music!

Hm, I got stuck in some dialogue with Knight Maerwynn. This was pretty fun though. I didn't think it'd be so hard to divide my attention but it was a real challenge! I'd say one thing you should do though is make the gold more obvious. It took me a couple deaths to realize where I had to look to check my money. Nice work!

It took me a while to understand that I had to make all of them as my lovers to win. I kept refusing Prince Andriet because he's a giant douche xD

It's fun, but I wish you could have mashed the genres a little better. Taking turns between the waves and the dialogue or something. Also, it would be cool if you had multiple ways of reaching an ending: becoming lovers with any of them or just by brute force, repelling their armies and staying alone.

But I really enjoyed the dialogues and some of the options are hilarious!

Great job!

I loved the dialogues, but I think the combination of genres could be better worked out, despite the short time you had.

I left my rating of your game, if you can leave your feedback in our game, Witch's Escape.

I hope you continue with the project.

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/41/witchs-escape

You mixed these genres much better than I expected. I couldn't tell, does becoming lovers with someone actually halt the flow of troops? It seemed like the case but wasn't positive. I thought it was REALLY cool to see how my dialogue options affected the playfield. In a full version, if you could change more things than just the flow of troops that would be amazing and it'd fully weaved the gameplay together. Bold idea and good execution! Very impressive you could manage such a complex game with that many people on your team.