Really pretty game, the art is good ! I had an issue to find out where the enemies and object are, because of the color palette being the same as the environment.

Love the art, great job!

really nice style and idea of combination of topdown game and tower defense is neat

You really nailed the lo-fi aesthetic.

The level design is very good! The artistic color tone also fits the theme very well

Cool game! I really like the arts and color palette, the green-ish tone fits well with the alien, while the dark blue-ish suits the abandoned atmosphere at Earth, well done!

I think the idea of the scanning signal is really great.
Also, I really like the blueprint-style level art and backgrounds.

It feels a bit clunky, but looks really good 😄

It looks really cool, I like the feel of it, and I’m finding my way off the map

Beautiful game, I love the color palette ^^
I was a bit confused about the goal of the game at first but still managed to build a tower and a bit of defenses!

Really cool and well made! Very fitting with the theme, both scanning locally for the radio towers and then the radio towers sending a long range signal to the mothership. 🗼🚀

It seemes quite unfinished though, as several things were not clear:

- It was not clear if I was taking damage in combat. For a while I thought I didn't, until I suddenly died. But it seems you just revive after a while. 😄 I realized after a while that Zigna makes a sound when he is injured. At first I thought it was the enemies that made the sound. 🙃

- There is nothing in-game telling you what the different turretts do, so I kept having to go back to this page to remember which one is which. Even just having a small text label next to each icon would have been very useful.

- When powering the towers I am told "to build some defenses", which I did. But it is not clear for what reason I need to build defenses. Will the radio tower be destroyed if I don't defend it? Does it have hit points? I just put up a few turrets (what I could afford) and left, and that seemed to work, but not clear if something would have happened if I didn't do anything. The combat music that starts is very good at giving the sense of urgency though. 😎

- It is not explained how many towers there are, which was a little frustrating. It is good to have a sense of how much you are progressing while playing.

- After the 3rd tower I was told to await the mothership. I kept building turrets to hold my ground and wait, but nothing happened after that. I guess you didn't have time to make a proper end game scene? That is fine, but if powering the 3rd tower is the end of the game, the final message about the mothership should at least have informed the player about this so that it is clear that the game is now finished. :)

Great job!

@paulmag thanks for taking the time to highlight the pain points! You're definitely right about the unfinished portions. The Jam time crunch prevented us from implementing several much needed features. A cost for death, healthbar on the player, turrets, and the signal tower most of all, turret costs and names, and the total towers "synched" were planned. So too was a "beam me up" rescue animation after the mothership arrives. Currently you Win as soon as you get the message that the mothership is coming.

Really neat visuals in this game!

At first I was highly confused, mostly from the lack of feedback from the game, both about what were the towers that could be rebuilt, that I actually needed to, and the scanner and I weren't the best of friends so I stopped using it. And it seemed to work just fine walking around not building towers.

Finally I actually managed to build a tower and it was quite neat, though I was struggling with the UI/interactions.

I did lack a sense of progress towards any objective, especially with the map huge like that. And with my health situation. So in the end I unfortunately gave up.

But again, really strong visual style in the game!

Play-through that shows and goes into more detail of the troubles I had :laughing:
https://youtu.be/71W1DqnxxFw

@local-minimum Wow, a recorded player experience like this is a treat! I'm glad you enjoyed the visuals.
We came up against the jam time limit and didn't get to some important UI, like how many operational signal towers you have at any given time.

The player's goal is to retrofit three signal towers to form an array powerful enough to contact their mothership. The signal towers have 100 HP and as soon as you "sync" them and the battle music begins playing, they get attacked by the robots that detect the signal. If two towers fall, not enough remain to achieve your goal so the player loses. Currently if the player falls to 0 HP, they regenerate after ten seconds.

We crammed all the information into the opening dialogue as a last minute band-aid for not having a tutorial or tool tips around the tower, but it's definitely not ideal!
HP bars, signal tower current/total display, and turret names plus costs are definitely necessary. We hope to upload a post jam update that alleviates these issues.

And holy cow, the amount of things that were added in the final twenty minutes to submission were impressive!

I loved the graphics. Especially the color palette choice. Just like a Game Boy. Very good!

Even though the sprites are very small, you can still find your way around. It requires a bit of eye strain, but it's okay.

I found the map too big. I wandered around for a long time and couldn't find the third antenna. Also, the life respawn takes too long. The first time I played, I even reset because I thought there was a bug. In current games, especially in game jams, "coming back to life" needs to be quick. Save points would also be good. Coming back to life next to a robot that kills you is complicated.

Overall, it's a good game.

Congratulations!

Wow this is impressive

Would very much love to see this fleshed out a bit further. Was a fun idea

Loved the art, and the idea with the towers was pretty cool, very well fitted for the theme, nice entry!

The artistic style creates a great atmosphere!

Fun little concept and well designed. Could have used a little bit more feedback as it was hard to tell what was going on sometimes. Art was really good and added well to the atmosphere, but it was difficult to tell the difference between enemies and the environment sometimes. Overall, nice job.

Really good and polished game. The atmosphere is great and the graphics as well. It feels like there are alot of systems here that are not very clear to me. I had to read the instructions, and re-read them while playing. And still got my ass kicked. By adding some more feedback or instructions in game I think this would have been a home-run! Great work