Signal Tower by Jhonny111

[raw]
made by Jhonny111 for Ludum Dare 59 (JAM)

Signal Tower

In this game you are defending an important signal tower from enemies. Buy and upgrade your weapons and defend as many waves as you can. Post your highest wave in the comments. At some point its impossible to survive. I do not know when. Feel free to find out.

This page does not load the game properly so you can play on itch.io. Link below.

Disclaimer - What didn't make it (because work got in the way):

  • Sounds
  • 2 more planned weapons (a fast close range cannon and a long range laser)
  • 1 planned boss with multiple weapon segments
  • enemy death animations, they just stand there and despawn. Had explosion assets, but no time to implement

The game was spreadsheet balanced around those things so some values might feel a little off. Music can sometimes be buggy. You can change volume in the main menu.

Controls - also described ingame

  • WASD - Move
  • Mouse - Look
  • Space - Jump (just for fun)
  • E - Interact
  • P - Pause
  • Esc - Show Mouse in browser

Ratings

Overall 596th 3.333⭐ 23🧑‍⚖️
Fun 322th 3.524⭐ 23🧑‍⚖️
Innovation 736th 2.762⭐ 23🧑‍⚖️
Theme 671th 3.167⭐ 23🧑‍⚖️
Graphics 617th 3.286⭐ 23🧑‍⚖️
Mood 620th 3.286⭐ 23🧑‍⚖️
Given 23🗳️ 24🗨️

Feedback

tenthousandfireants
Apr 21st · 03:29 UTC
Great job, this was fun to play and that's important, you have something cool here so I hope you can continue to improve upon it! had mild screensize issues from browser/firefox. couldn't see text notifications in the blue boxes completely on the bottom right
tenthousandfireants
Apr 21st · 04:09 UTC
playing it on itch io now to see what i can get for high score :) ...and that is...wave 26 right now Ill comment again or edit this when I get further!

Edit1: wave 32
edit2: ![waves1111.png](///raw/9df/36/z/71cb0.png)
runningopenloop
Apr 24th · 22:04 UTC
Good game, i'm at wave 21.
-J
nikitose
Apr 27th · 01:13 UTC
really good!! great job!!!
VenomousMouse
Apr 27th · 13:19 UTC
Nice tower defence. Good job!
LoHii
Apr 27th · 14:50 UTC
The start of something is clearly here, but it is missing a lot. Gameplaywise, I don't think there are that many decisions to make. The only time I felt I had a choice when I was closer to the medium shield upgrade, since for that I had some context. Without any numbers, I was just buying stuff for the weapons since I had no idea which choice was good.

The explosion of enemies would've added a lot, but that's something you knew already. It's a jam, life comes in the way. I know you're not in the audio category, but moving sideways caused the audio to shift weirdly.
fabelay
Apr 27th · 22:59 UTC
The game looks really promising and absolutely something I'd play the sh*t out of. I had a hard time playing it thought, because in the first run everything was upside down and the controls reversed too (the floor was the ceiling and going left made me go right)?! That was super weird. I tried again and then it was all correct and I could play many waves. It was quiet some fun and the only thing I was really missing was more special effects like explosions, hit markers, etc. Nice entry, thank you for sharing!
igorekkedziorek
Apr 29th · 11:17 UTC
I'm a big fan of tower defense games and this was quite enjoyable, however I don't know why it's an embed and not seperate window. it made the expierence kinda janky
OddballDave
Apr 29th · 11:33 UTC
![ss_56.png](///raw/c1/z/72eb8.png)

Did I get the record!?

Nice game. Everything was straight forward enough. Once you've upgraded everything to max there's not much else to do, but it was fun up until then. Good stuff :8ball:

**EDIT** Seems image uploads are broken. I survived 56 waves BTW
smilewood
Apr 29th · 13:35 UTC
The gameplay loop is interesting, but I found it a little boring, a lot of the time is spent just waiting for waves to happen. Maybe if there was a manually fired gun on the platform to give me something to do during the waves? The upgrade system worked well and I felt like the trickle of materials was at about the right pace to be fun, although I would have liked more information on what the upgrades did. upgrading was mostly a "well upgrades are probably better, right?" rather than a decision based on anything. The models were well put together, I liked the variety of enemy ships, and the choice of background music felt perfectly epic for the defense mission. Overall a promising start, and a refreshingly different style of tower defense. Well Done!
captain-awesome
Apr 29th · 14:23 UTC
I really liked this game. I got overpowered pretty quickly though.
Kvn
Apr 29th · 14:25 UTC
Fun game, but it got slightly boring after I upgraded all the cannons. to the top level. There were also some minor bugs with the UI when I was looking to buy, sell or update a cannon, but no big deal. But despite these, the game was very fun overall!
Abiral
Apr 29th · 19:22 UTC
i loved the game and the tower defense mechanics, but picking up the crates near the launchers was sometimes difficult, overall the gameplay was good.
CodeRaurus
Apr 30th · 17:30 UTC
The music really gives an epic atmosphere to this one. Neat defense game with a nice variety of weapons and enemies. The audio was glitching for me any time I moved. I figured maybe the audio player is spatial and turns with the input, causing the issue. The audio was also pretty loud, wish I could've tone it down a notch.

Good job!
McBaker
May 01st · 11:35 UTC
I love TD games, surprised there aren't more at LD! It's a decent prototype and you should be proud if that was your goal.

Some thoughts that came to my mind:
- you have 2 types of towers (plus shield generator), but 5 different kinds of resources. Usually, I'd suggest the other way around, so the player might build some towers that require more of a specific resource for example
- I don't know what upgrades do. I know, things do more damage, looks like have a bigger range, but as a player, the game doesn't tell me in any way whether it's worth building another tower, or upgrading an existing one.
- a bit related to the previous point - there is not much "strategy" here - if I knew that, for example, upgrade costs 3x more than building stuff, but gives me 5x the fire power, I could choose between a bit more danger now, with saving money for upgrade, or investing in new towers now, which might hurt me in future rounds, but helps me now
- would be cool to see some more diversity with the towers, so I can choose between big damage, or slowing enemies down etc
zhangzhimu
May 03rd · 13:22 UTC
The musical atmosphere is extremely well-crafted. Additionally, the design of this space-themed gameplay seems quite interesting.
Looking forward to future releases.
GettingRekt
May 09th · 12:16 UTC
Nice work with this game. Having a tower defense in first person while watching the onslaught was interesting. I liked that there were so many different 3D models for shots, enemies and turrets and upgrades. I did miss some information about the upgrades and also the reason to having so many different resources when the player couldnt interact with them in any meaningful way. Never the less, great work!