Into the Forrest by frompdx
You must explore deeper and deeper into the forrest to eliminate all enemies lurking in the woods so your village will be safe.
Read the instructions on the game page

| Link | https://pdxgames.itch.io/ld48 |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/into-the-forrest |
Ratings
| Overall | 1738th | 2.862⭐ | 49🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 1807th | 2.457⭐ | 49🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 1316th | 2.913⭐ | 48🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 1551th | 3.064⭐ | 49🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 1358th | 2.03⭐ | 35🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 1557th | 2.907⭐ | 45🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 48🗳️ | 60🗨️ |
You probably had more features in mind, but currency / enemy attacks seem pretty important to have (and/or a reason for exploring the forest)
And I know you mentioned the art came from an asset pack, but the assets you picked complement your game really well.
It can be done and it's definitely there! ..and you definitely did it!
**Here's a tip or two:**
* Please update your entry with instructions!
* Please tell us about your units and what they do!
Despite it being Kenney assets, I do find the trees actually pretty irritating on the eyes since there's so much of them... Please darken them if you can.
It's pretty clear you ran out of time, but good work nonetheless!
Critique aside, I know you didn't make the art and music, but selecting things that fit your theme still isn't easy and you did it well. This game is probably only a couple ours of UI improvements from one of my top games so far, I'd be interested to hear if you ever push out an update
Controls are quite hard, but it seems like a self written engine so it is a miracle to me how anyone can come up with all the code, the drawing/rendering, adding the pathfinding, realtime attack logic and so on.
But while this is super impressive, it lacks a lot of features from the perspective of a player, such as panning with right or middle mouse button, Text instead of icons would have helped a lot, when attacking enemies, all your units stack up, leading to 1vs1 combat, seemingly no resources, you can produce infinite units.
Still a very impressive entry.
I'd like to take credit for writing my own engine, but I actually built game with Godot. I agree with the lack of important features though. A lot of quality of life things didn't make it in with the time constraints. It was a good learning experience and my first attempt at making anything RTS-like. I'm glad I gave it a shot as I now know a lot more about how to approach building something like this in the future.
The graphics are nice at first, but when you start zooming out and trying to find enemies they become a huge problem. The enemies and base units look way too similar, and its hard to find enemies on the map because they just blend in.
Also, I saw the 30 second tutorial which got me started, but I still had no idea what the different buildings were for and what differentiated the units.
Good job putting this together for the jam.
@skleembof I changed the color of the enemy units to make the easier to find and tell apart from the player units. I also made the player units health bars easier to see.
@fractal-flower-girl and @doctortm I think maybe I have fixed the bugs you ran into while placing buildings. The mechanic seems to be working much better now.
@aditya-kumar Made some bug fixes that make the game more playable, see above.
Very good the movement of the unit, I really manage to fight a little war, but then I can't click and select new unit to move my archery into the tower.
Sadly enemy wont come to attack me (if not attacked by me first) and this should be one of the feature that I really would like to see in a further development.
Well done!
Thank you for the feedback @saintchristopher777!
You did a lot for a single person, but picked a project too ambitious. Of course in LD you are free to do whatever you want to get your fun, and I hope you learned a lot while making this, but for players to have fun as well you should keep project ambition from growing more than what your process can achieve. RTS involves complicated things like pathfinding, combat rules and whatnot that will eat your time or end up not working well. I did like the idea of the game though.
Your game has huge potential. I really enjoyed playing and I would like to see the final game.
It's not as obvious as it could be and the game really needs a tutorial (or more intuitive controls).
@smeljey Thanks for the feedback! I agree on the point about the controls. They are nowhere as intuitive as they could be. I was kind of working backwards from RTS games that I've played, but a lot of quality of life controls you'd find in other games are missing here.
There are a lot of bugs, but that is obvious when you make such a game on your own. Most bugs I have already seen in other comments, but I had another one that wasn't mentioned yet. When you are placing a tower, it already starts shooting.
Adding some kind of limited resources could make the game more complete. Not necessarily gathering, just an amount that should allow you to achieve your goal of clearing the woods. Now it just feels unlimited, so it is only a matter of time.
Overall, good effort!