Chomp Radio by alexrose
Heard of Tower Defense? Well this is Tower Attack — mixed with Snake.
Build turrets, infiltrate the base, and survive a fully procedurally generated run.
🎮 How to Play
Destroy all the radio dishes to stop the signals from those annoying callers, then make your way deeper into the depths
Open your menu at any time to build new turrets.
Be careful - if you crash into your own body, it’ll break off.
🕹 Controls
Mouse & Keyboard
- Aim + Left Click — Shoot
- Right Click — Open Menu
- WASD — Move / Select snake piece
- Space — Buy / Sell
- Q / E — Change turret
- X — Exit menu / Bomb
Controller
- Right Stick — Shoot
- Left Stick — Move / Select turret
- Y — Open Menu
- LB / RB — Change turret
- B — Bomb / Exit menu
- X — Sell turret piece
👤 Credits
- Code / Design — AlexRoseGames
- Art — SinclairStrange
- Music / SFX / VA Processing — Atmospherium
- Voice Acting — Alex
| itch | https://alexrose.itch.io/chomp-radio |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/59/chomp-radio |
Ratings
| Overall | 240th | 3.833⭐ | 32🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 102th | 3.917⭐ | 32🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 138th | 3.845⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 602th | 3.35⭐ | 32🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 334th | 3.917⭐ | 32🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 56th | 4.172⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 40th | 4.2⭐ | 32🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 353th | 3.759⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 32🗳️ | 36🗨️ |
I'll admit, I was able to stick with the default turret and I pretty much obtained the "win the game button" by clicking the mouse with my 30 or so guns. I think the game could benefit from either limiting how many of those you can simultaneously wield, or increase the price with each turret you have. If the game forced variety on the player's back, I think it could be more interesting.
On top of the hundreds of incomming transmission and phone calls, you've just won the **Mr. Popular** award. And just look how happy Snake is to pose for the photo.

Here's my recorded gameplay, for maximum feedbackitude:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2CCY-PkrnV8
And then I was like... oh... right.... this is snake!
I finished this game by the skin of my teeth. I think I upgraded a few health stations and then enemies were a non-concern the entire game, but in the last minute after killing the final transmission tower I bumped something unexpectedly, panicked at the turn in direction, severed almost my entire arsenal and then suddenly had like a pixel of health left. I thought I was all done, but with mad dash for the exit I just barely made it. Phew! Was glad I got to finish!
There's a lot of cool stuff here. The art is great, the voice acting is really fun, and probably the most impressive feature is the upgrade menu system with the dual selection of body-part / turret-type. That menu experience is rich with slick details that really made it feel great to use. So well done.
If I look for critique I guess it'd be the minor enemies -- they weren't quite dangerous enough to be interesting, and I wished the had a little more juice to signal when they were hit or hit me. Their low danger let me turn my brain off a bit too much. BUT it would have been a disaster if they were tuned too far the other way and made the game too dangerous. I did appreciate being able to cruise through and experience the whole experience.
The "leave me alone" use of the signal theme was a great starting point, and the fact that this landed you on snake, love it. Lol at bathroom wall.
Nice entry!
Oh -- and thanks to Alex for the keynote vid. Fired me up at the kick-off, hell yeah.
The presentation in general was amazing. Props to whoever did the voice acting because I could kinda tell instantly that the opening 2 characters were snake and otocon even before I saw the codec pictures lol. I think the best thing about the presentation though has to be the weapon menu. It was slick AF to use and always managed to feel intuitive even when the snake was all over the place. There were some scenarios where I kinda had to keep pressing directions until it moved to the next body part, but that's just a nitpick.
As for the gameplay, it was cool tbh. I love games that sorta let you feel like a bossfight from another game and this was very fun in that regard. That said, the enemies stopped feeling light a threat as the game went on. It also didn't really seem to matter what my choice of weapon was since different builds didn't really change my tactics all that much. If anything, what was actually threatening me was the size of the snake as the game went on. Losing most of your body and your weaponry when more and more enemies start spawning was definitely an interesting scenario lol.
All that said though, I think my only real problems with the game were the following
- I could never really tell when and if I was actually taking damage. Is it just if the head gets hit or the entire body of the snake ?
- The levels did end up feeling a little too confusing and samey in terms of their structure and visual layouts. It didn't impact the fun of the game much, but it did make them slightly annoying to navigate
None the less, this was a pretty solid game overall. Kudos to the whole team
Yeah I basically agree, I spent the whole jam coding and had no time left to design. This was my first procgen game and there were systems upon systems, also before I did the procgen I did a tilegen system that then got rolled into the procgen so we even had cities and buildings but that had to get thrown out. I would've loved to have done a boss and proper ending but it would've taken a week. Shot for the moon and glad I at least finished a game that is playable start to end but yeah. I really like the mechanic and I don't think I did it anywhere near the justice it is capable of but overall it went fine.
Super fun experience. Absolutely hilarious voice acting. Fast-paced action. Well done. Would have loved to have been able to hit escape for a pause menu or something. Cheers!
The graphics are fairly simple but nicely stylized and cogent - I like the variety of designs for the enemies you come across at later levels. Great use of theme, and solid audio too. I love the radio interruptions as you progress. Great writing and performances, I'll probably be giving this game a 5 not just for Theme but also Humour.
Honestly unsure if this is a bug but enemies sometimes spawn outside of the map limits. I actually really like this, it makes the world feel like it exists outside the bounds of the playspace. Dynamism in unreachable places is often overlooked in games but it's an effect I think can be great for 'filling in the blanks' of visual interest. And of course, adding the extra dimension to the theme interpretation through the visual storytelling of enemies "Signaling" for external backup forces who are arriving at the edges of the map.
To briefly touch on the theme, there is strong ludonarrative consonance in the use of radio towers both mechanically - they are your win condition - but also narratively, allowing more NPCs to contact you as you play. It's impossible for the idea of Signal to leave your mind as you play this game (and though I call it a game for the sake of clarity in this review, philosophically I really think of this project as more of a 'gamified theme').
The difficulty could do with some tuning; I was definitely not playing well if I'm being honest, but a single healing node really carried me pretty far through the game. I neglected upgrades for a significant portion of the game as I was able to proceed with my current turrets; I think I got to around $1700 before meeting enough resistance to require some more investment. Difficulty is always one of those things that's hard to nail on a jam timeline though, and I think it's clear that the priorities lay in adherence to the theme (Signal). I would take this exquisite use of theme over a more difficult game any day.
5/5 for theme, and possibly 0/5 for everything else just to really drive home the contrast in how well I think Chomp Radio executed the theme.
Thanks for the game!
The voice acting was excellent, and I love the idea of being a growing, slithering tank of destruction. :thumbsup:
I just wish I was better at avoiding my own ass in tight spaces :laughing:
That said, there is something about the game that felt off. Snake having a heavy turn rate made input feel laggy (even though it really wasn't) and, for a distant shmup relative, there was a distinct lack of audiovisual oomph; for example, the towers just turn into dust with no explosion fanfare or even a single sound effect. Then, the actual game aspect is rough around the edges. Towers feel needlessly spongy (might be skill issue), mob spawn rules are *atrocious* and combined with their non-existent pathfinding you end up with those hilarious mob clusters. Having glanced at 100th_Coin's playthrough, I guess the game expects the player to buy enough pulsars, but this feels like a band-aid fix for a game that needed a bit more playtesting. I don't mean to sound too harsh, but you guys are Michelin-star chefs, so I can't help but hold you to a higher standard.
Wish there was a restart button because I softlocked myself, as seen in the recording below:
https://youtu.be/vKHrntxbcOs
Finding the last radio dish was often annoying, a map or visual indicator would have been helpful.
It was unclear to me why parts were sometimes detaching, though I know now after reading this page again.
Made it to the end, although I would have hoped for some sort of victory screen. I gess jam time ran out :D
Overall great entry!
I did very much find it interesting how you sort of were inclined to grow yourself large (but i don't know if there was much of a benefit to it) but that being long meant it was near impossible to guard your tail and thus you became more vulnerable. I think it could become a really great game it explored that dynamic deeper.
Unfortunately I found the dialog very hard to follow because my focus was so much on the snaking and shooting.
Play-through with more comments and proof of the embarrassing long time it took before i realized why i lost pieces of myself sometimes:
https://youtu.be/lSxHhU_NQrg
double post by accident, my bad