PLAY ON ITCH.IO

Cool take on the theme.

I absolutely love how this game *looks* - not just literally the graphics, though they are lovely, but I love the *scale* of everything, how your screen is just swarming with *stuff*. Beyond that, the game is pretty fun- though it does feel a bit slow for my tastes.

The core concept was pretty cool. The graphics and music set the mood nicely. The only gripe I had was that it didn't feel like I had a lot of agency. Like, if I didn't build a bunch of extractors right away, I didn't have enough chrono to build anything else. And then once I had enough, I was just building everything else off cooldown.

I know 48 isn't a lot of time to balance so it'll definitely get there. I would definitely play a full version of this game though, great job!

@anonymous thanks for playing, balance was definitely the hardest part. I threw cooldowns on buildings in the last 12 hours to fix some of the balancing problems I was having. It was either too easy or too hard.

@paroxysmal thanks for playing

@untitled-studios glad you liked the scale of things, its one of my favorite parts of the project. And sorry about the slow pacing, I know its not for everyone and was afraid most people would get bored rather quickly.

The pixel art animations look great and the gameplay is smooth, if not a bit slow. I played it twice and enjoyed seeing my strategy evolve and do better! It seems like no matter what though the endless swarm will take over. The lack of a game over screen feels kind of cool in a way, like this is the alien's planet now.

Has a very polished look to it, and I love the building aspects!

I like the setting of this game. It takes a while to understand what the different "words" mean (maybe some icons could be a bit better :smile:) It is a funny idea but I feel like the difficulty curve rises a bit too quickly.

I hesitated doing a RTS for this jam and the result is really cool ! There is just this long timer on every building that feels very frustrating. I managed to create a mecha but it didn't saved me ! Congrats for your game ! :)

@vhalenn yea, the timers on buildings was added last minute to balance the game a bit. I was struggling to get the balance right between too easy and too hard.

@oadt game balance was the hardest thing to work on. I couldn't quite get it right with the limited time.

@jacob-diaz thanks!

@sky yea its not possible to win, just to survive as long as you can. Maybe I should have added a score as an incentive to "win".

Seemed really easy at the beginning, but was really scrambling when I started to lose ground. Really fun overall the only thing I wish it had was an easy way to tell your max capacity

@coleb I wanted to add in the ability to select buildings to see stats and also to sell them but I cut features in order to finish the game faster.

Great game! A little bit a different mob type would've been nice but I had lots of fun trying to beat this tiny RTS.

Very nice entry! I liked the concept but I felt it was a little unbalanced.

@stoickekis I actually had a flying enemy type planned that could only be killed by building towers, but I scrapped it to finish the rest of the mechanics and didn't have time to add it back in.

@serxiolas yea the balance was the hardest part for me. I couldn't quite get it right.

reminds me of starcraft

@clonze I wish lol, but it was definitely an inspiration

Awesome way to implement the theme and integrate it to the game's story. Really fun, even though my first attempts were pretty terrible, but it kept my interest to not stop. Good work!

Man, you really gotta play optimally if you want to survive in this game. Once your start losing buildings, it's basically game over as well. There's no way of coming back and since all your buildings get destroyed, it's no different than the beginning of the game. Would be nice if there was some way of showing how well you did, like an on-screen timer, since if you take a screenshot of the end, there's basically no way of telling if you died at minute 5 or minute 50. It would also be cool if there were some more strategy to building placement. Right now it seems the only strategy is to build outwards from the middle. That being said, I quite enjoyed it. Played through twice to see if I could play optimally, but felt bad when I got overpowered and had nothing to show for how long I played.

This game was quite fun (though very difficult)! I wasn't able to get anywhere near the base in the video you posted. It gets seriously intense about 10-20 rounds in or so (considering a round to be 10 seconds). I do wish it had a "game over" screen at the end, but I understand the difficulty adding that with such a short time limit for development.

@vykri yea I probably should have had some sort of scoring system at the end. I got stuck on a couple of bugs and balancing to add more mechanics.

@cafebeef the difficulty was the hardest part for me. I was tweaking the balance of the game up to 3 hours before the deadline and I think I still didn't get it quite right.

@tengusheath For what it's worth, I do think this is the kind of game that it's possible to get much better at over time. I tried a second playthrough, and I got quite a bit further after I realized that the original guys you have are enough to defend your base for the first minute or two (so you can focus on resource extraction then), and that mechs actually are quite powerful.

Fun game, I like the base defense take on the theme, eventhoguh its quite obvious. The graphics style is cool and killing cockroaches are fun! I got a bit dizzy when there was a lot of enemies all marching to the middle :D I think the endgame trigger was missing because nothing happened when the base got destroyed. The shooting audio sample got pretty annoying fast. Anyways well done!

Graphics are so nice and the concept is good. Might be a bit too hard as once you start loosing buildings it seems like there is no way to come back. Overall well realised anyway, for me the main thing missing is feedbacks when your buildings get attacked and destroyed, and the firegun sound quickly become annoying.

Pretty polished entry well done. Graphics are pretty awesome, gameplay is pretty good (could use a bit more balancing). The countdown having 5 decimal places is really triggering me for some reason .toString("N2") and if that is the biggest thing I'm complaining about then you have done an amazing job.

I really like the style of this and it's very well made. I did find it difficult to survive and couldn't see any way to get past ~20 buildings and reach the score in the trailer, even after I had many attempts (is the trailer's score actually attainable?). The 10 second timers made it feel a little slow at times, but it's fun once you get going (and before you get swamped). I was thinking it might be nice to have a kind of wall unit that you can use to funnel the enemies through a choke-point, adding to the strategy a bit.
The pixel art is very nice and I love the sounds the buildings make when you place them. Good controls and UI too. Great work!

I had fun with this, the art was simple, effective and gave a good look. The sounds were nice. The overall game felt really fun, the cool downs were a little aggressive, with me watching my demise. some upgrades for the soldiers would be fun too.

Really good entry - well done!

This is a solid entry! Nothing mindblowing but the basic game loop has been crafted very well and I like the phase the game progresses.

The static music and constant gun sounds start to get quite jarring for ears - especially when there are lot of enemies on the screen and the shooting is constant.

It was also a bit annoying that some of the soldiers started to wander very far from the base which basically rendered them completely useless. I would have hoped them to stay near the base or have an ability to call them back if needed. Possibly this was an intended feature and I was just a bit too greedy with pumping out extractors while I should have invested into more barrack earlier.

Overall, a solid entry and execution. Great work!

@nash sorry about the sounds, I'm not very good with sound design and music unfortunately. The soldiers wandering too far is a bug. They are supposed to stick close to their spawn points but I wasn't able to figure out why it wasn't working correctly to fix it.

@phillip-scott upgrades for soldiers would have been a good idea. Thanks for playing.

@ben-barsdell its possible to reach the score in the trailer, but I play tested for hours and know the enemy spawn rates and timers on everything so my play experience is a little biased. A wall building would have been a good idea. I actually started using the extractors and supply depots as shields in my later testing.

@dr-v yea the balancing was super hard. I wasn't expecting it too be so difficult but it was the hardest part for me. Sorry about the timer lol, I kind of like having a lot of decimal places so I left it.

@venfola sound design is one of my weak points. I tried to make the sound effects not annoying, but I agree the gunfire gets irritating after a while. I wanted to have the buildings explode on death, but spent too much time trying to balance the gameplay that I didn't have time to go back and add in effects like that.

@borgi no, there isn't a bug with the end game trigger, I just didn't have time to add in a game over screen or menu. Thanks for playing!

@tengusheath Slightly changing the sound with a random pitch each time you play it is an easy trick to add some variations.

I like the concept a lot, but found it too sluggish to keep me invested

@juanrod707 definitely a slow paced game, not for everyone.

This scratches an idle-game itch in a sort of way, really cool!

Pretty great game, love the graphics and animations. Plays pretty well

Fun little game! It was a bit slow at the start and a bit fast at the end :wink: but honestly I'd rather play a game that gets difficult quickly than one that goes on indefinitely! Awesome job for a compo game :smile:

graphics are nice. But, sorry, not my cup of tea. It took too long to get anything done for m.e.
But I like the pulsating audio.
Congratulation on publishing!

Aside from some slight balancing issues (And I can't really fault you for that in a compo game), this was a really great experience! I really liked the take on the theme, and the satisfaction of increasing your revenue stream/soldier count as the game went on. I would have preferred if the timer had been limited to 1 or 2 decimal places, since the flickering from it dropping/adding decimals was a bit distracting. But otherwise the graphics were really solid, and complemented the audio in producing a cohesive mood. Really strong entry, nice work!

I love it a lot! ^^ gets real hard fast, I cant work out the strat to end up with a gigantic defensive compound ToT but I still love it. If you kept working on this I'd def like to see where youd take it further developed :)

While there's a definitive advantage to learning by doing, some kind of a tutorial at the start of the game would've been greatly appreciated. I rushed to build a couple of Extractors so I can fund the Barracks, only to discover it's not spawning units. At first I thought it was a bug so I restarted the game a couple of times, went for the same strategy, got the same results. Then I built the Depot.

I might be a slow learner, but to my defense, RTS games usually have extra supply capacity so you can build some units right off the bat, without a need to build extra supply buildings.

Love what you did with the theme, the minimalistic art style and music! Gameplay loop is solid, I had great fun getting overwhelmed a couple of times.

With more work, I think you can make this into a proper game, some sort of idle RTS roguelike, with
meta progression, unit upgrades, a way to heal units/repair buildings and more enemy variety.

This was quite fun. I like the simple art style and the sounds. The game is a bit hard though. I got quickly overrun. The idea is nice anyway :) good job

I'm sure others have mentioned it, but it's generally a bad idea in strategy games where you buy units to have a unit that doesn't do anything until you've bought a more expensive unit. Even worse is when neither unit can do anything without the other. It makes it harder for the player to learn how the game is played, since that building they put their hard-earned money into is seemingly not working. For the depot, I would make it more expensive than the barracks and then give the player a starting capacity for the barracks. Then maybe an "at capacity" mouseover text for the barracks when they can't supply any more units because of that.

The other main annoyance I had was that the units would often wander off from the buildings I wanted them to protect and I would lose a building to their negligence. I could not figure out any way to wrangle them back to where I needed them.

Annoyances aside, I like the graphical style and the gameplay felt smooth overall. Nice work!

so hard!I got overran within like 5 mins
great game still!

Super cool "tower" defense game once you start getting a stable income, but the start is _so much slow_ I almost stopped playing out of boredom :(

I think that having *both* a limited income and a placement cooldown is too much...

Absolutely love the graphics, though!

Nice game, and pretty nice graphics. I was a bit confused as to what mechs do, but I think that might have just been because I got them right about when my base was overwhelmed.