Popiel Defense by Minus
You're duke Popiel II and your job is to survive an onslaught of mice. If you lose, you'll get eaten.
This is a tower defense. It's not balanced, due to our lack of prior experience and time constraints, so please be kind.
Controls: Camera movement with WSAD and rotation by pressing RMB and dragging. All other things - mouse
Update! We managed to fix few issues, please do have them in mind when rating game: - Game over screen is now properly displayed after losing - Objects can no longer be placed on paths - Fixed sprites softness due to bilinear filtering - UI scaling issues have been fixed - UI elements are now looking properly with background borders - Tower fixing is now working as intended.
Web build has broken water shaders, we're trying to fix that issue. For best visuals we recommend playing on a native windows/linux build.




Ratings
| Overall | 725th | 3.5⭐ | 34🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 670th | 3.403⭐ | 33🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 1259th | 2.581⭐ | 33🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 743th | 3.617⭐ | 32🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 1028th | 3.188⭐ | 34🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 456th | 3.345⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 1203th | 2.9⭐ | 32🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 39🗳️ | 46🗨️ |
There are bugs, but they seem to only complement the game in a rather goofy way
Being able to put defenses in the road, only to be surprised enemies passes through them like as if it was nothing, to no limit on defenses letting you make the terrain impossible for the enemies to traverse, it's just amazing
Also, loose the game at least once, the tower falling is the best part ever
A simply, buggy game that got me in the floor laughing, I loved it
Anyway, only problem is, why did you invert the mouse ? That is really my only gripe, its just feels so... off.
But otherwise excellent game. =D
There are some bugs/minor annoyances, like being able to place buildings through the UI and tower effects and their ranges not being communicated to the player.
Overall though, I enjoyed the game and I especially liked the art.
I know balancing is a very difficult thing to do (my game is very unbalanced) but I think an easy way to extend the gameplay is to not have the mice spawn from all 4 docks right from the start. I Imagine that was your original idea since the mice come from ships and it makes perfect sense that they would arrive at different times as reinforcements.
The dialogue was funny and very intense, the graphics are nice but the complete lack of audio was kind of jarring. A looping soundtrack and projectile sound effects are very important for tower defense games to keep it from getting boring.
Good job on the game and coordinating such a large team in such a small amount of time
@hungrycatgames Yeah, we didn't have enough time for testing, and camera controls are all messed up (not only these, game logic is messed up, difficulty is just oh, you got there? Then die.") So this needs a lot more work than might seem from how it works currently. But we did learn a few new things. And I think that is best outcome from participating in Ludum Dare. We always try to give ourselves a little bit more challenging task during LD, so we can check how our skills improve over time :D
There are a few technical issues. I think you know them already, but might as well list them here:
* Can't cancel building once selected (or at least I didn't find how). I expected it to be secondary mouse button.
* You can click to build `tower` (and get ghost tower) even when you don't have money for it. This creates a bit frustrating scenarios when coupled with first mentioned issue. Have 55 Gold, try to build 100G `tower` => cannot cancel and have to wait doing nothing until you reach 100G.
* You can click-build towers through UI.
* Initial camera angle is rather `"interesting"`.
* I was very confused at how the camera rotation works. I think you now do rotation purely based only on mouse delta{x,y}?; rather than change from original click position and current positions in respect to original mouse-position-to-ground raycast and current mouse position-to-ground raycast.
* Can rotate below terrain, which adds to the confusion. I think Unity Cinemachine has a nice orbital camera model with rotational limits.
And gameplay considerations:
* While mice and archer models and animations are really nice, usually I am looking at them from far way above; and mice, and archers look more or less like beans and dots most of the time. Maybe to show-off the animations it would sense to have a in-world first person character with which you can run around and place towers.
* All 4 paths are not really balanced, some are shorter, some longer, some have more loops than others, essentially requiring less towers to protect the side. That in itself is not a problem, but if all enemies from all sides are always the same, then one path will always fail faster than others.
* Once enemies reach the tower, it's really hard to place towers in range, hit main tower attackers and be useful in general gameplay.
* Would love to see range of towers, when placing them.
* Would love to see some tower stats when placing them, then I could translate their power output to damage done (shown in mice healthbars)
Would play again, if you have an updated version :slight_smile:
Camera was not properly tested, there is basically no balance, some information is not communicated clearly.
As of some issues:
- you can cancel building by pressing escape (alright, maybe for everyone else escape is not obvious as some way of cancelling buildings and we didn't add it to description)
- UI is indeed not masking mouse, so you can click through it
- No information for player about tower stats and their range, also there's no upgrading of towers, which was planned, but due to limited time and first try at tower defense game we just had to skip alot of ideas.
Anyway, if we release proper version of the game it will be linked also here.
Most of the issues you noted we are aware of, only camera one is something new... We used cinemachine and it seems orbits are set incorrectly and will allow camera to reach under terrain (maybe camera collider went missing).