I do enjoy how the zombies have very little aggro range as you'd expect.

This reminds me of your previous game, I had fun messing with this one, it wasn't obvious at first how to summon creatures other than the weakest one so I just spammed it until I died (which didn't take long), then I realized that you have to convert weak units into stronger ones and boy did I have fun. the game is really unforgiving, one mistake and everything is gone which kept me nervous the whole time lol. I appreciate that all enemies are killed when my portal's health reaches half but it only prolonged my survival by a little bit because I'd get crushed next wave. this is really fun to mess with! you guys should put some instruction in the itch.io page just so people don't leave because of confusion.

@0x-void-x0 Hey bro nice to see you here!
Thanks, we forgot to set the starting scene to the tutorial so I fixed that now, also thanks for letting me know about the itch page, I added some stuff there. Cant wait to try your game! :D

### To any playtesters
We are very interested in how you beat the game (Unit composition/Tactics) :thinking:
So please do include them if you are willing to share them :smile_cat:

We would love to know how many tries it took you to beat the game (or give up)
We always struggle with judging how hard our games are :heart:

@kujoen woah that tutorial changed the game completely! understanding shortcuts and the ability to make the circle larger made this one of the most fun games I've played so far. I barely made it to wave 20 before getting crushed lol. so the biggest challenge with this game is not what units you want to spawn, it's getting them to spawn because each time you pick a unit the circle goes back to default size so you have to scroll again which takes time. so I found myself getting my units killed before I can convert them which was the biggest obstacle, I think making the circle keep its size or increasing the scroll speed would make the game more about strategy than speed. the shortcuts are nice but I wish I can click a card once then do multiple conversions without the card getting deselected each time. other than that this is so much fun! getting a strong unique to spawn after so much hardwork spawning minions and converting them felt so rewarding and there is a sense of challenge that is really well paced. I'm glad you made a tutorial because it's easy to miss out on much of the game.

based on the obstacles I mentioned, my winning strategy was to spawn minions and quickly convert to zombies before they died, if I try a stronger unit they die before I can scroll enough to include enough units so the strat for me was to spam zombies then convert zombies to other stronger units

@0x-void-x0 Thanks for giving it another try, I totally agree with your points, thanks for the feedback!

It never loaded for me... It looked really fun and I'm sad I didn't have the chance to try it out. Good job anyway!

Really cool concept, it's amazing to have a game with this scope in a game jam. Wave 6 has a steep difficulty curve; I've tried several times but just couldn't beat it. Congratulations on the game, awesome submission.

I had some issues with my chrome tab becoming unresponsive, but I really enjoy the game. The music, art, and gameplay match quite well and it creates very enjoyable experience. Would love to be able to have a downloadable EXE because no matter what I did, the bottom of the UI was always cut off a bit. Very well done. :)

@trevor-lentz Unfortunately the game freezes when particle systems are loaded for the first time, afterwards it no longer lags, but it is understandably annoying :/

EDIT:
We fixed this!

cool game.
I beat on my second try. I figured out to spawn skeletons on top of ranged units is very helpful and then immediately destroying them again by pressing D. before that the ranged units gave me a lot of trouble.

I got a banshee early and some zombies which was very effective
In the last few waves I was just spamming to get liches and reapers until it was over ^^

cool concept having to sacrifice units to get bigger ones. it felt a bit tedious when wanting to summon the very big boys with the skeleton limit ( I assume that's for performance reasons )
i was just spamming stuff in the end without thinking much anymore.

one of the best entries I have played in this jam for sure tho!

Really cool summoning little guys to summon bigger guys mechanic! Don't think I've ever seen that before. The sfx was crunchy, but would've loved for the moody music to be a bit more in the foreground. It was very quiet and mixed a little too far into the background. Awesome experience, I died at wave 20... will be back to fight through the end I'm sure <3

cool game, the difficulty curve is a bit rough, but it's fun

for some reason I couldn't summon the bigger guys because my skeletons were locked after putting down or so

@pandalk You can place a maximum of 100 skeletons, you can clear any on the screen with the D key and don't worry you get their cost back!

This is really nice work, it's not really my genre
but I enjoyed playing, even though I was not very good!
Great Job!

Really fun game, good job for the amount of work! :clap:

Damn I didn’t quite beat it… took a bit to understand the mechanics, I feel the tutorial would be more helpful if you could reopen it during play. But once I knew how to play it was fun, and I definitely think I have the knowledge now to be able to beat it on the next try. Thinking about it more though, I’m not sure what the enemy conversion mechanic added to the game? Like if I have 400 energy, I couldn’t go straight to a reaper, I first have to summon the lowest guys, upgrade them, then upgrade again. This didn’t cost any additional energy, and didn’t really add any strategy, only extra steps required to summon bulky units. This is why I feel a pause button was needed to be able to do all these steps quickly and more accurately. But you could’ve just placed higher tier units like you do for the small skeletons… Anywho, I still really enjoyed the game! :heart:

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2129902300

@justcamh
Our main reason behind this was to strengthen the concept of summoning via the circle as the core component of our gameplay loop. Simply spawning the higher level units would have shifted away from the concept of summoning and made the game (in our eyes) too shallow and not innovative. Clicking the highest level scroll and instantly summoning the strongest unit takes no skill and would not have any real difficulty curve. With that system, anybody could summon multiple reapers and lich's in their first runs and win. Instead, we wanted the player to progressively get better at summoning in terms of speed and positioning of units to be able to win the game. That's also why we give you more than enough resources to work with, as the difficulty should not be obtaining the resources, but how skilled you are at using them.

Watching you play was awesome because it really showed that we did hit our target there, I personally loved how your first banshee got instantly killed by archers and you saying "what a bad unit", even though it was just a positioning issue. But then it clicked and you started building up a frontline and got faster at summoning your units.

While I do think we hit the mark there, some issues are apparent, such as the inability to pause to read unit information and we for sure could have built a much better tutorial, however, we were unable due to time.

Thanks for playing our game, was a blast watching you :heart: