Tominrigg Tactics by Dan Allison

Synopsis
A tactics style game where you fight your way out of a doomed town while trying to save as many civilians as you can at the same time.
Controls
Left Click - Select tile and click on buttons
Right Click - Step back
Q - Zoom in/out
Plot
The king has abandoned us. No surprises there, the monarchy only cares about its coffer and a village like Tominrigg is apparently disposable. I'll have something to say to the royal bastard's face once we get out of here. For now though, we need to focus. The town is a write off, there's no denying that but there's still people stuck in amongst the chaos. These bony bastards may claim stake to Tominrigg today but we can still save lives out there! Let's get to it!
Development
Done over the weekend while still having some time to play Elden Ring. All the code, art, animations and writing were done by me. The audio was from resources available online. Everything was done as part of the jam but some of the map logic was based on some rough work I had done previously.
Ideally, there would have still been another level of polish but happy with where it ended up. It would have been nice to spend more time on the UI/UX and tidying up the quips, along with fixing some of the bugs (Particularly some pathfinding issues) but hopefully I can get round to that once the voting is over.
Screenshots



Licenses:
Battle Of The Creek by Alexander Nakarada | https://www.serpentsoundstudios.com
Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Alagard - https://www.dafont.com/alagard.font
Colour Palette - https://lospec.com/palette-list/kalimba-26
| Link | https://danallison.itch.io/tominriggtactics |
| Link | https://danallison.itch.io/tominriggtactics |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/tominrigg-tactic |
Ratings
| Overall | 242th | 3.897⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 222th | 3.81⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 744th | 3.259⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 592th | 3.741⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 354th | 4.05⭐ | 32🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 471th | 3.69⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 24🗳️ | 45🗨️ |
I think that the main thing to improve would be to add an UI element showing the order of turns, because most often I had no clue whether I could attack before a certain enemy, so that makes strategy a bit hard.
Great job!
The Music and graphics are great!
The white intro text + Green title text is a little hard to read.
But I love these kind of games and spent a good amount of time playing this one. I would say maybe its a little bit slow as well, I think having a button to skip the enemies animations or something would go a long way.
Definitely a fun game though, probably my favorite I've played so far.
@haastregt @kr0s Absolutely agree. It's something I thought of towards the end of development but didn't have the time to get anything decent in so had to leave it. As for the healing statues, I have logic in place to destroy them after a few uses but decided just to leave them as is but I do agree that that situation is a bit broken!
@deylinia Agreed on both points. I added in the logic for showing all of the turns when there was a lot less enemies in the game and it wasn't until testing towards the end that I realised how long it can get as more spawn in so think being able to skip past them is a really good idea. Glad you enjoyed it though!
There is still some balancing problems (I felt that the enemies were spawning really fast and some villagers seemed impossible to save), but even with that it was a pleasure to play. I also had a bug, where I coulnd't have the "save" interaction with a villager which was in range (but he was one hit to die so it didn't changed anynthin in the end uhuh ). Really an impressive entry, excellent work!
I played very aggresively on the second run. I wanted to see, if I can stop the mages from taking over more houses. Didn't work sadly. They got a second one. From that point on my team didn't do enough damage to stop them. :(
But at least I could save everyone!
It was nice, that I could "win" the game, although being overrun in the end. It felt rewarding getting everyone out. Many other games I played didn't do that.
Good job on the game!
* Bug: rescuing doesn't work after attacking. Just nothing happens when you click on the villager.
* Amazing music!
* The ordering if things is a bit weird. For example, a character should die or leave the map immediately, instead of waiting for that to happen in the turn system. Otherwise it feels like a bug and things are not working as intended
* Waiting for all of the skeletons towards the end of the game was a bit annoying. Maybe the timing can be sped up if the game knows they aren't attacking.
I like that the objective of the game was not killing the monsters per se (focusing on them is not a good idea), it gives an interesting twist to the genre.
One thing that bothered me a bit was the fact that enemies could pass through you, so trying to block the passage with your characters is a fruitless strategy when trying to save villagers. Also, after enough turns you have to wait so long for your turn because there are so enemies.
The short catchphrases for the units were a really nice addition and they help give character to them.
Great job!
@pixelydian Very honoured to be part of that list! Hope your husband enjoys the game (And all the others) as well!
@vidim888 There's a tutorial in game but it's not very in depth and it can only be accessed in the menu which isn't great. So think you're right and I'll get something added the game page to give some more information.
@stefan-funke I maybe shouldn't have made it so hard to stop the first house getting taken but my logic with that was that to fit the "delay the inevitable" theme I wanted the town to eventually get overrun. But if they only had one house it would be possible to fight them back. I didn't start the skeletons with two houses so the player would see what the necromancers were trying to do as an almost mini tutorial. But I like your approach in trying to stop it anyway and I think I should have adjusted it slightly so if you know what you're doing and you go straight for the necromancer you can stop it. Almost like a bonus for replaying it with more knowledge!
@christian-zommerfelds I agree about the ordering I think. I liked the idea of still getting attacked while trying to escape but after playing more I think leaving straight away just makes more sense. And you're definitely right about the timing issues too.
@conradoclark You're definitely right about the enemy blocking, it makes much more sense to do it that way. I had planned on this but because of the way I wrote the pathfinding code it made it harder to implement than I wanted to. Realised my mistake too late and just had to leave it as is but it's definitely something I'd change with an updated version.
See you all at LD51!