LudumData

Scython by BinarySpark

[raw]
made by BinarySpark for Ludum Dare 48 (JAM)

BURN THE DARKNESS AWAY

From the LootLads team comes a tower defense & economy manager with a twist!

The dark rift looms before you, promising boundless energies, in exchange for the low, low price of your entire world. You don't want that. You just want one part of the deal.

MAIN FEATURES

  • Siphon the energies of the Nine Layers of Hell - but beware, the further you tap into its power, the stronger its grasp becomes...
  • Strategize and experiment! In all levels, there are multiple ways to set up your buildings.
  • Multiple levels available for replayability and increased difficulty.

HOW TO PLAY

  • Protect your siphons. The Siphons provide you with :fire: Infernite, which you can use to create buildings.
  • Create defenses to stop the Corruption from spreading to your Siphons. Build up your walls and hunker down.
  • Power your defenses by placing Generators, which create :zap: Energy, and build cables to transport the :zap: Energy to your buildings.
  • Upgrade your buildings: if you have enough :fire: Infernite, you can click on them and click the Upgrade button to increase their effectiveness (for Towers and Walls) or their Energy output (for Generators).
  • Keep the Corruption at bay until you reach the Ninth Layer and extract all of its virtues.

SCREENSHOTS

2.png

1.png

GAMEPLAY TIPS

Try to experiment! But if you're having trouble:

  • Walls greatly slow the spread of Corruption through them. Place them at your front lines, such as near the Portal.
  • Pulsar Towers remove Corruption in an area, and are most effective when they cover lots of tiles.
  • Solar Towers target only one tile at a time, which makes them very good to place near choke points, or across chasms.
  • Remember to upgrade your buildings (click on them), to improve their efficiency or :zap: Energy output.

Advanced tips:

  • Generators also work like Cables, in that they allow :zap: Energy to pass through them in all directions. You can use this to save space.
  • In a pinch, you can :hammer: Deconstruct buildings (click on them) to receive some :fire: Infernite back. You could use this to move your buildings backwards, for example.

CHANGELOG

(the original 1.0 version is available for download if you want to use that instead)

Version 1.1: * Fixed broken postprocessing in the Web version * Minor adjustments to game difficulty

CREDITS

  • Jorrit Neslo - environment art, UI art
  • Sam Minh Ly - level design, balancing, visual effects
  • Mika Molenkamp - programming, audio & UI implementation

Fonts used: Zebulon, Spaceline, Sansation (1001freefonts.com)

Music and sounds from opengameart.org (Beeping Bobbing, Humming Beetle, Electrosteel, Blind Shift) and freesound.com.

BEGIN THE PURGE (AND THE PROFITS) HERE

Link https://www.mikamolenkamp.nl/ld48/
Link https://binaryspark.itch.io/scython
Link https://github.com/iridinite/ld48-scython
Original URL https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/scython

Ratings

Overall 578th 3.719⭐ 34🧑‍⚖️
Fun 409th 3.703⭐ 34🧑‍⚖️
Innovation 685th 3.406⭐ 34🧑‍⚖️
Theme 1558th 3.047⭐ 34🧑‍⚖️
Graphics 345th 4.172⭐ 34🧑‍⚖️
Humor 1062th 2.478⭐ 25🧑‍⚖️
Mood 543th 3.766⭐ 34🧑‍⚖️
Given 33🗳️ 45🗨️

Feedback

Nick Howard
27. Apr 2021 · 10:27 UTC
This has a really amazing potential to be something great! With such a short time frame, it's completely understandable that some stuff, like a story or whatnot couldn't be easily thrown into the game. The look and feel of everything is spot on! I just feel like I lack a purpose of why or how I should do anything. I kind of got a self-sustaining thing going while raking in points, but would be better to have some sort of purpose to it as well.

But like I said! This has huge potential to be really addicting and cool!
DevParty
28. Apr 2021 · 13:27 UTC
Nice game! I really liked the GFX
nyanpierre
28. Apr 2021 · 13:34 UTC
Good job ! you did a pretty nice work
HardCodeD
28. Apr 2021 · 13:37 UTC
A lot of posibilities and replayability for such a short timeframe to develope it! Good work!
Arttu Halonen
28. Apr 2021 · 13:42 UTC
The game looks great and placing the buildings works really well! Unfortunately the spread of an abstract corruption was a bit hard to grasp in terms of gameplay. For instance, even though the corruption effect gets more or less intense depending on the amount of corruption on the tile, it was still a bit non-intuitive to internalize what that meant for me as a player. Was I doing well? Was I doing poorly? Where was the corruption spreading more strongly despite my defenses? I really feel that this game has a lot of potential. Keep it up!
PowerAnze
28. Apr 2021 · 13:54 UTC
Great game, I am a sucker for any kind of tower defense. The upgrades and higher corruption density were hard to differentiate, making it difficult to grasp the state of the field at a glance. I am impressed by the number of levels you have in there and the balance feels great. I might revisit this game even after the jam again
DivFord
28. Apr 2021 · 13:55 UTC
I really enjoyed playing this one! The way the corruption spreads over the ground is a take on tower defence that I haven't seen before. The power grid system was also neat, and overall it was very satisfying.

The art and music were really cool, and the theming really evoked Doom's storyline for me.

My one complaint is that going deeper didn't have much impact. I would occasionally glance at the top-right corner and be surprised to see that I'd gone down a layer. It would be cool to have some screenshake, or particles, or a more dramatic change in the background to really sell that idea of getting deeper.
Pedro Miranda
28. Apr 2021 · 13:58 UTC
what a great entry! So polished! the graphics and sound design are awesome, congratulations!
Manage to finish it!

![scythoncomplete.PNG](///raw/36d/8/z/413b7.png)
Nicso
28. Apr 2021 · 13:59 UTC
really nice polished game

Maybe a little bit on the slow pace side but fun one anyway
mrbrainfed
28. Apr 2021 · 15:32 UTC
Such a polished game for such a short timeframe! Very replayable, and good graphics. Great job!
Klon160
28. Apr 2021 · 17:20 UTC
Great game, a cool mechanic and good graphics and sound. I always like to play tower defense games and this one is no exception.
Tarcisiotm
28. Apr 2021 · 18:52 UTC
Solid entry! Really well executed, snappy interface, gorgeous art! Good job.

The corruption was a little difficult for me to understand, along with the towers functions, but once understood, they work well.
smt
28. Apr 2021 · 19:26 UTC
this is really well done and looks super good too, awesome job for such little time
darkfrost
28. Apr 2021 · 19:56 UTC
Realllly nice game!

Art - Looks great! Love the style, executed really well, fits in with the game great! Throwing on some anti-aliasing would've helped a bunch, especially at the low web player resolution, but I just fullscreened it to see it in all it's glory!
Music - Sounded great, fitted the game really well, kept the excitement up!
Gameplay - Started off a bit slow and seemed easy, but then it really ramped up and got hard! Managed to just win but it was getting close!

Really nice job, amazed you manage to make this feel nicely balanced within the jam time!
leggy
29. Apr 2021 · 07:36 UTC
Well done. Art and sound are pretty solid. Gameplay lacks a couple of things: delete/sell items and a quit button. Besides that you did a really nice job in level design. Thank you for submission.
🎤 BinarySpark
29. Apr 2021 · 13:16 UTC
@leggy You can deconstruct buildings by clicking on them and then clicking the Deconstruct button, this also refunds some Infernite. :slight_smile:
BytingGames
29. Apr 2021 · 13:42 UTC
This is a pretty polished game! The graphics look cohesive and smooth, I really like the floaty blocks and the glow effect of the beams and cables. I found the gameplay a bit slow, cause visually there isn't that much happening on your opponents side. In a standard tower defense game, you have enemies swarming your base and every kill feels like you are doing progress. You are sometimes focusing on single enemies in hope of them not reaching their goal. For me this tension and progression was not that present here. BUT it's unique in what it tries to accomplish with the enemy design, and that I like! Never seen a spreading enemy in a tower defense game before. Cool, that it can destroy your buildings, although not SO cool, if that buildings are yours^^

You did really well for the user interaction experience. I really liked just placing buildings and upgrading. And the buildings even change graphics when you upgrade them, that is more than one can hope for in a ludum dare game :D Also pretty solid menu there :thumbsup:
PeachTreeOath
29. Apr 2021 · 22:44 UTC
This is the first attempt at a game like Creeper World that I've seen - I always thought the concept had other places the design go move towards. Your game is a bit more on the traditional TD side and less on creating sprawling networks, which I liked. I also like the idea of the corruption coming out in waves, such that you could throw in the early-descent mechanic. It's always fun to have push-your-luck mechanics in TDs.

I had a relatively simple playstyle. I just placed pulsar towers along the boundaries around the portals, generators around them, and then solar towers behind those. Upgrade high traffic areas a bit after that. Descending early on the last map is quite dangerous and I stopped doing it beyond layer 4.

Overall an excellent game, I was able to clear the last stage fairly easily but the game feels pretty intense at all times because you don't know just how much damage the next layer will do. And of course, things get pretty hairy as your network gets compromised and you have to turtle up in the corner.

![stage.PNG](///raw/649/1/z/41af7.png)
🎤 BinarySpark
30. Apr 2021 · 11:17 UTC
@divford Better effects (including some VFX and sounds) for layer descents were on the backlog, but we just ran out of time unfortunately. Thank you for playing!

@darkfrost Cheers! I opted to turn off AA in the Web version to save on performance, just in case - but the Windows version has it on! Glad to hear it didn't affect your experience too much.

@bytinggames Thanks for the detailed feedback! It's definitely a more slow-paced game, and the abstract nature of the opponent probably isn't helping. But glad you liked it - as you mentioned, we were trying to do something different :)

@peachtreeoath Thank you! Creeper World was one of the inspirations, indeed! Yes, the manual-descent mechanic is definitely an added challenge; you get less Infernite than you would when waiting the full 120 seconds (to be exact, you get 66% of the "remaining" Siphon output for the layer). If we had more time, we would've liked to do better onboarding and explaining of some of the mechanics, but alas, time is a scarce resource during LD :smile: And congrats on beating level 4!
1studio
30. Apr 2021 · 20:28 UTC
Wow what a polished game! the music is great the design is great. Overall the best game so far(for me).
miej
01. May 2021 · 02:05 UTC
I didn't really grok what I was supposed to be doing in this game, even with the description above. just....holding the corruption at bay I guess? that said, the overall mechanics and design of the game were pretty on point. nicely done!
C4Scar
02. May 2021 · 13:46 UTC
The visuals/particle effects were super nice! It felt a little dark but I guess it fit the theme of the game. It was lots of fun building up a network to beat back the corruption, making sure everything had power and was upgraded appropriately. It was a little slow at times so a speed up option would be nice. The placing and removing of items was intuitive which felt very good for getting into it.
Sam Minh
03. May 2021 · 13:23 UTC
@1studio Thank you for playing and even saying it is the best game you played so far :smile: . We really appreciate it!

@miej Yeah, we could have definitely made a nice introduction and some context at the start. We will make sure to do that early on in development. Thanks for playing!

@c4scar Thanks for checking out our game after I checked out you're entry 'Into Conflict'! Glad you liked it!
SpacialSeasoning
03. May 2021 · 16:28 UTC
This is a great game! Surprisingly smooth for a ludum dare entry. I didn't find any bugs or problems.
Dobrila
03. May 2021 · 16:39 UTC
i was a bit confused as what the goal of the game was at first. loved the graphics and the music was great ! didnt feel it really fit the theme though xD
Radiotrophia
06. May 2021 · 11:57 UTC
Very cool! I enjoyed the music alot :>
Prof.Suarez
11. May 2021 · 16:42 UTC
Great Job:
-Addictive Gameplay
-Great Graphics
-Great pacing

Delta's:
-Controls weren't obvious but I got used to it
-resource management a bit confusing
Roka Josh
15. May 2021 · 23:12 UTC
This was a really amazing game, had me hooked and it captures the same impending doom feeling as creeper world when it feels things are starting to turn against you. Amazing job!
JoaoG
17. May 2021 · 18:22 UTC
I spent some time playing and I really enjoyed the game. Good graphics and soundtrack, the game is simply addictive, but I admit it is a bit confusing at first. Great job!