Cartoon Tactics by Jiri Hysek
This game is turn based battle arena mixed with a battle royale games on procedurally generated maps so each game is unique! You control three diferent alien units (scout, archer and knight) and your goal is to beat opponents units. The map is shrinking over time so you will run out of space if you don't finish them soon!
This game is a little experiment to see if I can crunch whole weekend ;) The game is definitely overscoped for 48h jam. But I wanted to make this kind of game and I was courious if I can make it in two days. And it turned out I can! Well... barely. It's not too polished but hey, it has AI and procedural generation of maps :)
Anyway, I hope you will enjoy it, AI is not very clever so it should be easy and maybe a bit funny.
What's great about this game - it has procedurally generated terrain, each game is different - it has computer controlled opponent with (really simple) AI using A* for traversing graph made from tilemap - and I made it in Compo! No matter how the game will be rated, I've already won this my little experiment
What's not too great - I haven't time to actually sit and play it for a while and tweak parameters. If i had, I would make shrinking of the map faster (every round after the first 2 round). It would be more fun. Compo deadline is over though.. so it is what it is..
* Unit types * - knight: slow, strong, melee - scout: fast, weak, melee - archer: fast (not as fast as a scout), stronger than scout, weaker than knight, ranged attack
* Controls * - click on tile with your unit to select it - click on tile whithin action range -> move to tile - click on tile with enemy within fire range -> attack - esc - pause / menu
Used tools - Godot Engine - Inkscape + Gimp - Audacity - Bfxr
Awesome Phil's let's play (Cartoon Tactics starts at 28 min and 21 sec) https://youtu.be/-osF36Qsiuo
| Windows | https://jhysek.itch.io/cartoon-tactics |
| macOS | https://jhysek.itch.io/cartoon-tactics |
| Linux | https://jhysek.itch.io/cartoon-tactics |
| Source code | https://github.com/jhysek/LD42 |
| HTML5 (web) | https://jhysek.itch.io/cartoon-tactics |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/42/cartoon-tactics |
Ratings
| Overall | 225th | 3.589⭐ | 47🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 286th | 3.375⭐ | 46🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 450th | 3.023⭐ | 45🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 425th | 3.409⭐ | 46🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 286th | 3.409⭐ | 46🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 276th | 3.116⭐ | 45🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 233th | 2.738⭐ | 44🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 371th | 2.917⭐ | 44🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 53🗳️ | 16🗨️ |
It's a neat tactics game but I think there could be something added to make the player continue playing aftrer the first battle, because from what I've seen, the second battle is exactly like the first one aside from the map layout. Maybe adding an extra unit each time you win or something like that, so the battles can feel more and more intense. But it was still pretty cool :D
Definitely impressive amount of work that went into this, looks great, but needs more game design love!
@talios: It was, next time in the sake of my sanity I'll made something simple, this was too much. Yeah, leveling/equiping units would be nice but I don't want to see it for a while :D
@tuism: you're right - to be honest I wanted to make this kind of game before theme was announced and after that I was trying to mount the theme onto this game :) But I think it's nice mechanics which adds more tactical options, the shrinking is too slow though.. It should shrink faster so you almost always run out of space. It would be more interesting I guess..
@talios, @tuism: Anyway it's nice you've noticed amount of work I putted into it :) If I have more time, I would ballance parameters better and polish it a lot better.. but game jam is always about tradeofs..
The scout can be used for manipulating opponents to place where you want them (somewhere near border) and it has enough action points to run away if necesary. And my original idea was that scout is a flying unit so it can fly over empty tiles. It would be way more useful if the map shriks every turn not every second turn.. maybe in post-compo version.
My bit of feedback: Maybe start the player closer to the enemies so that they can get right into the action. My first few turns were just movement. Skipping to the action right away might be a bit more fun.
Great work!
@hi-irie: actually godot helped me a lot. Without it's TileMap and AStar class I wouldn't make it.
The shrinking world sometimes allowed some great tactics, although that needed some help from the terrain generator.
Perhaps it's worth making a second level which could be a little more challenging. For example make 2 parties of enemies: scout+scout near the player and knight+archer in a distance. So that scouts block the player near the edge while other two come to the center and wait for player
The only thing that surprised me rulewise that the range of my arche is limited by how far he can go. I would have expected him to always be able to shoot the same distance. Overall, great entry!
@philstrahl hey :p
I enjoy the overall presentation especially the funny sounds the units make. The gameplay aspect is unfortunately a bit lacking as it mostly ends up just colliding in the middle and the shrinking not really mattering all that much. Would be great to see some more use of the terrain and other ways of attacking like setting traps.
Overall still a really good entry!
Only thing to work on if you chose to continue this game is to prehapes make the out realm (the part that disapears) preassure both teams a little more, maybe making more drop off with more frequency. Another solution would be to increase the team size (less space to manuver with a bigger team may result in the "edge" being more of a threat).
As I said fantastic work maybe come share your game at our discord https://discord.gg/amwhTDX