Tidal Wave by BjornStahl
This game is a new take on the tower defence genre where you have access to zero offensive capabilities. You can not get rid of the attacking waves and will have to use your stout walls to survive.
The world has been overrun by rampaging semi sentient boulders. Try to fend them of for as long as possible.
- You can only build walls to protect yourself.
- Build structures to gain materials and food.
- If boulders manages to climb the walls, people die, if you don't have food, people die.
- Loose when your population reaches 0.

Hotfix
- Fixed a problem where you could not restart after loosing.
- Switched camera.
- Fixed population growth issue.
| Link | https://bjornstahl.itch.io/tidal-wave |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/tidal-wave |
Ratings
| Overall | 475th | 3.684⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 271th | 3.763⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 20th | 4.306⭐ | 20🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 372th | 3.921⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 1093th | 3.026⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 1073th | 2.147⭐ | 19🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 1164th | 2.974⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 10🗳️ | 26🗨️ |
I loved it so much, I could lose hours in this if I'm not careful. Well done! :D
It's quite fresh and seems to have great potential. It needs to find a better way to execute what its triying to do and a substantial amount of improvments in the clarity of gameplay however.
One of the problems is the game fail state is hard to notice. Feels extremely sudden, there should be a larger area of "in between" where you are starting to be overwhelmed and SEE IT CLEARLY (could be done with slopes (if the top of the wall is a rising slope and only full penetration beyond the wall counts as a loss, then you can get A CLEAR VISUAL SENSE of the thing going over the wall, here it seems at some point some ball kinda goes high enough (which is really hard to judge from that far but tbh mostly because you have too much area.things to look at already) and then you lost pretty much immediatly (there is no recourse and you feel like you missed it completly)
Building things seems like a pretty good idea as a core gameplay. But I think what would really make it work is actual ACTIVE ACTION, to waveclear or something along those lines.
Sound. Obviously. I dont mind no graphics, but sound is king.
Anyway its a great idea, you might some low grades in most areas but to me this deserves a good grade on overall, because the idea has potential and its still 'well' executed.
If you provide some kind of tutorial or just tell me what are the controls, I'll try again. Don't hesitate to tell me, I would really like to play your game!

If there for some reason is a problem with the buttons you could try to use the 1-3 keys.
My main issue with it was that when I moved the walls out, some balls warped inside the walls - probably due to their collision not updating fast enough. So the main way I died was because I was trying to increase the wall size.
I played about a dozen times to try and get past that initial wall size increase. Once I did, I was able to last for 528 seconds, which felt pretty good - although I died again because I tried to increase the walls a third time.
If it weren't for that bug I would probably still be playing instead of typing this up - I don't know why I find it so addicting... :dizzy_face:
I like that phisical representation of "water" and tidal waves, but i think it's not the best way to do that in future in a big game.
Also i have isuess with expanding, when water goes throught the walls no matter what.