Verbose by santriptasharma
A strategy game made for LudumDare46, with the theme "Keep It Alive".
The game takes place in 2157, where words have fallen victim to the free market. Corporations invest in and charge royalties on the usage of certain words. The word "it" has fallen into near obscurity.
You are the Chief Strategist of It Corp. and you will stop at nothing, not even war, to keep "it" alive, and to make "it" thrive.

| Youtube | https://santripta.itch.io/verboseld46 |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/verbose |
Ratings
| Overall | 946th | 3.6⭐ | 37🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 835th | 3.514⭐ | 37🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 1222th | 3.286⭐ | 37🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 252th | 4.157⭐ | 37🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 997th | 3.779⭐ | 36🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 858th | 3.382⭐ | 36🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 108th | 4.086⭐ | 37🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 747th | 3.65⭐ | 32🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 25🗳️ | 42🗨️ |
well done its really good
wish u the best
What I got instead was ghostwriter spam
How it was supposed to be countered was that if you were trying to spam it, you'd be pummelled by the opponents' activists and authors, but clearly, the enemies' rates of spawning weren't high enough for that.
Thanks for playing the game!
thanks for the feedback!
thanks a lot for playing!
Thanks for playing the game!
I'm also glad that someone recognised the age of war influence. I used to play a lot of flash games and two games in particular had influence on this game: Age of War and Stick Wars.
About the AI, the bp system and state machine do exist, it's just that they're not well tuned due to lack of time. How it works is, each level has an AI behaviour data structure associated with it, containing BP/s, Tower health, a list of spawnables (a data structure containing unit type, stats and mean seconds per appearance), aggressiveness, max spawns per spawn opportunity, spawn spacing.
I won't get into the details of it, it's quite a messy bit of logic, but it works pretty well (if tuned properly).
I'm currently working on a post jam version. After playing through stick wars to understand why it feels balanced, I also thought about putting a queue system in place. I decided (out of laziness) to instead have the units spawn a few units behind the tower, causing the same outcome. I've also shrunk the no man's land to 1/4th it's size, since the long stretch made it very hard to penetrate to the tower with any unit other than the ghostwriter.
Sorry for the slight rant.
Again, thanks for the great feedback!
The game works well, looks good, sounds good.
I thought that the best thing about it was its premise, it was funny and ridiculous. I think it would make sense if the gameplay involved words somehow.
Good work, have a nice day.
For example, at some random point in the game, a word falls out of the sky letter by letter. If you are able to type the letters out as they fall and before they hit the ground, you get some buff or something. It would also make sense for these words to be thesaurus-ised (to make them verbose).
Maybe one of these could be the word acceleration, which when successfully typed gives your units a speed buff.
I don't know yet though, I haven't tried it out and don't know how it feels yet. It might be a bit tedious, but I wanna give it a try!
Thanks for the feedback!
yes, I know, amazing design! (...)
About the animations, we were originally supposed to have a walk cycle, but my [artist](https://shubhro.in) (amazing artist), had never worked with pixel art before so he had trouble making them. I told him to leave it and introduced....... PROGRAMMER WALK CYCLES!
I agree with you on the point of making information available to the player. I think it's essential. One of my favourite games, [heat signature](, is all about having all the information available to you: How the AI will react to this, or how many guards there will be, or what weapons they will have. I would have loved to make this change, but in all honesty, I kinda forgot about it. oops.
As for the last point, a post jam version is coming soon! Thanks for playing and giving feedback!
it seems like no one is getting it :(
A NEARLY IMPOSSIBLE LEVEL!
Thanks for playing and leaving feedback!
I just like the signs ok? :smiley:
I am sorry "it", I have failed you...
Great entry, a lot of humor and it's a novel concept!
Thanks for playing!
As for the broken-ness, I am working on it with a post jam patch!
Thanks for playing and leaving feedback!
Feel nice to play, has a funny story and there are a lot of interesting powerups.
As you said, it's quite unbalanced, but I'm sure that with more time it would have been fixed.
Good job !