Gridlock: A Tiny RTS by Hare Software

Gridlock
You are in charge of the local human garrison of a cozy little red planet. Your commander however is an ambitious man and wants you to create more space for new human residents. Regrettably, there are currently pesky aliens living on the planet that occupy much-desired land. It is your task to take over the remaining sectors to win.
Features:
- Nostalgic RTS vibes
- A variety of buildings and units
- Unique unit personalities
- An amazing soundtrack
Controls:
- Select units by clicking or dragging with the left mouse button
- Order units to move with the right mouse button
- Click on empty plots to construct buildings
- WASD or Middle mouse drag to move the camera
Tips:
- Click on empty plots to construct buildings
- Move your units into the square sectors to capture them
| Link | https://hare-software.itch.io/gridlock |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/54/gridlock-a-tiny-rts |
Ratings
| Overall | 250th | 3.885⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 69th | 4.135⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 577th | 3.34⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 811th | 3.269⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 574th | 3.615⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 56th | 4.154⭐ | 28🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 140th | 3.833⭐ | 26🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 352th | 3.78⭐ | 27🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 34🗳️ | 41🗨️ |
As always, your entries are more than a simple game, it's an experience that you remember long after the jam ends.
Fantastic job! :star:
I'm not a rts aficionado (I played several, but not a lot), so I'm probably not the best person to talk about balance here - but it seemed fine to me. The enemies gave you reasonable time to build up your strength but kept you on your toes as well. There was a good variety of units to build squads for various tasks.
It would be nice to have some more detailed descriptions of units (both mechanically and flavor-wise).
I actually managed to crash the game once :grin:. I think it's because the enemies took over the position while I was in the process of building (didn't finish before they took over).

Anyway, awesome jam entry!
Really enjoyed the game, even though I'm not usually a fan of RTS
Evertything's smooth and simple, non-stop shooting action with satysfying tactical choices
And the voice acting is superb!
Would love to see this turn into a complete game
Either way, good job all!
I read the instructions carefully, took a bit of time to figure out all the controls (since I tried w/o reading instructions at first xD) Have to admit though even after I got it mainly figured out - I wasn't very good at this game :') It seems I have some different types of soldiers, but visually they do not differ? And as far as I can see from descriptions, it's the difference of personality solely? Obviously it's fantastic how much you got done for a Jam game, but for the future updates it would be so cool to see different visuals for soldiers, and different abilities ^^ or maybe they do have different abilities and I didn't realize this? >_>
I find it cool I can position each unit separately, creating any battle formation I could desire, and at the same time it's easy to group them all together again. Overall I think it's a very interesting type of gameplay, I like the strategy angle ^^
Just right. Excellent work.
Great game otherwise.
You've done great work on implementing a working classic RTS control system. I didn't even need to look at the controls before going into the game, everything was intuitive and worked pretty good. The one small issue I had was that if you right-click your army on a building, they won't move. Several times I found myself ordering troops to move to a sector then realizing I right-clicked on the flag, so they did nothing. Not a big thing, but it would be nice if the units moved to a nearby location.
The graphics look pretty good. I love good pixelart, and the little animations on units are doing great work to make everything feel alive and dynamic. Same goes for the audio part, it's great to see there's a variety of weapons each with its own distinctive sound. The nice tense music in the background feels like a cherry on top of a cake. :)
The voice acting has to be the highlight of the game. The intro/outro sequences are well written, both fun and funny! It would be easy to make these too cringy, but the voice actor has managed perfectly to make them over the top without taking it too far. All the units sound great, too! I've enjoyed clicking through all of them to make sure I've heard all the voice lines. It's nice that you've managed to record more than one line for each unit - it might just be one line more, but it does help reduce the repetition greatly. Hearing that you've done that, I started spam-clicking each unit hoping you've also managed to add some easter-egg lines of units getting angry for being clicked too many times. And while you haven't done that (and who would in the short jam time? :) ), I still enjoyed the lines that were there.
I've found one small bug in several playthroughs, at least it looks like a bug to me. There seems to be a limit on how many units you can control. You can select however many units you like, but if you select too many, right-clicking anywhere doesn't seem to work.

In this screenshot you can see that I've also managed to get over the command point limit (I think two buildings created units at exactly the same time). I thought that this might have been the cause of the issue, but it wasn't - in the next game I tested it again without going over the limit and it still happened. It also didn't seem to be a problem with any specific unit, as I was able to select half of the entire army, move it, then do the same with the other half.
Also, while not a bug per se, it's something that made me curious. Is there a specific reason the building queue is limited to 17 units? It feels a bit like it's a reference that I'm missing. Either way, it's good to see you've implemented a good queue system, remembering the order units were queued.
Another thing I liked is that you've made randomly generated maps. The maps might be simple, but having them randomly connected makes several playthroughs not only viable, but pretty fun.
Overall, it's a really impressive jam entry. Bonus points for going for a nostalgia trip and executing it so amazingly well. Great job!
We actually had 400 extra words of dialogue written that had to be cut due to time constraints (sadge). Can't always get stuff in.
I didn't program so I can't speak about the bug you discovered but hopefully it didn't take away from the enjoyment too much :)
It's an overall very good entry, you really have something here!