Growin' Ballistic by alaah

⚠️ Attention, buds! ⚠️
The space farmers are coming for us, but fret not, for we have finally evolved biological weaponry.
For thousands of years, we feared The Harvest Season for our lives.
Now it's finally time for revenge!! Don't get harvested.
Controls
Mouse to interact/drag the camera/zoom
Web version: RMB to exit settings
Notes
There is no harvest button. You can't sell your plant brethen.
You can start the next wave immediately with the button in the top-right corner and try to finish the game as quickly as possible, or you can wait for the timer to run out.
The game has 21 waves.
Acknowledgements
Godot 4b10, Inkscape, Reaper, Vital, Koe recast, jsfxr
Cheats
- P to remove the next wave
- C to add gold
Ratings
| Overall | 46th | 3.935⭐ | 33🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 41th | 3.968⭐ | 33🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 92th | 3.613⭐ | 33🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 92th | 3.968⭐ | 33🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 66th | 4.048⭐ | 33🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 62th | 3.758⭐ | 33🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 55th | 3.6⭐ | 32🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 86th | 3.7⭐ | 32🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 30🗳️ | 42🗨️ |
I think the game should start zoomed out or have some indicative that you can do that. I played at least 2 games without moving the camera at all then I realized something strange, some turrets were shooting targets off screen, haha.
I had a third-party report about ships not attacking the plants. I couldn't replicate it for the life of me, but I added a button that bypasses collision-dodging AI in case it happens to anyone else. I also added a button that disables wheat drops since I had another report about low performance past wave 12.
But it was fun! 👍
The visuals are great, love the audio, and the twist on the theme is very clever. My only complaint would be that the intensity spikes very quickly, but maybe I'm just bad at the game haha. Regardless, I really like this submission!
It would have been nice to know which wave I was on, what was coming in the current wave, and what the wave's progress. The scrollable window was too small for me. That's just being nit picky though. Really, well done.
@pincushion I assume you have a 2160p display. Hi-dpi is my bane because I don't have a way to test it. The "solution" would be to reduce the desktop resolution to 1080p, but I'm aware it's too much to ask
After playing it again, I noticed that the current wave IS shown, but I must have scrolled up in the box (mouse wheel scrolls it)
Only after the last wave, is the wave not shown (If I don't actually scroll):

My main problem is that game could use some optimization, from wave 16 it got almost unplayable on web build, probably too much phisics objects, maybe the currency can be just a particle system, or something like this.
Well done)!
@corporation The "Disable wheat" setting fixes the performance of the web build.
@jackypark9852:
Dragons emit particles but they are relatively hard to see
Shallottes don't have a visual indicator (ran out of time) but they emit a unique sinusoidal sound
Mandrakes shoot when their eyes fully glow up, and also emit a unique sound
Controls are great too, hovering on wheat to collect is very satisfying.
It's an original tower defense, and it's hard to achieve that in such category. 👏👏👏
It would have been nice to have the ability to remove plants or to upgrade them.
great entry overall.
Here’s the start of your game if you wanted to watch initial thoughts youtu.be/_eTFfxJO2YM?t=10124
Loved the variety of enemies and defenders!
So, the first time I played I did ... ok. I didn't really pay attention to any of the plant statistics until the very end, when I lost on round 19. So, I was basically just using the meteor parsley for everything, but I realized right at the end that it had pretty low DPS overall.
Then, for my next few runs, I started playing in fullscreen, and with the wheat turned off. I was under the impression that the wheat was just a particle effect, and I had felt it was somewhat distracting and made it harder to see my plants.
I started using a strategy based basically entirely on cucumbers, but then the game crashed on round 15, and then when I tried again, it crashed on round 19.
At this point I figured that perhaps my changes to the settings were causing it to crash, so I decided to just play in non-fullscreen and with the wheat turned back on. But then I started running into a very strange problem. For some reason I wasn't getting any money!
This was super confusing to me. I restarted the game over and over, and I just couldn't seem to earn any money. Occasionally the money seemed to randomly increase by some amount. (I thought maybe my hand was just brushing the C key...?) I tried re-downloading the game. I tried playing the web version. In all cases, I couldn't seem to earn any money! This didn't seem like it could possibly be a bug, as it was happening across different versions of the game and it hadn't happened the first time.
But I couldn't find any information in the game description or anywhere else I looked about how I was supposed to earn money. However, I saw that the source code was available. Aha! I would be able to just see what was going on!
And then, after looking through the source code, I finally realized... oh. The wheat gives you money when you pick it up. It isn't just a particle effect.
So, suffice to say, I think there should be a note somewhere explaining where you earn money from in the game. :sweat_smile:
Okay, so, that was my story. But there was more to the game then that!
So, first of all, I really love the graphics here. Super clean and crisp.
Second, the core tower defense concept is absolutely fantastic. Having the enemy ships literally pulling your towers out of the ground is such a cool concept. I have previously played tower defense games where the enemies attacked my towers, but never in a way nearly this creative or fun.
It was also fun trying to come up with a good strategy, although my first real idea, after reading all the tower info, was to basically just use cucumbers and occasionally a couple other towers (e.g. I had a dragonfruit, as well as some meteor parsleys, with each group of cucumbers). And this strategy seemed to work pretty well.
The cucumber DPS was just so high, especially given its super long range. The only towers with more DPS had much shorter range, or simply attacked very occasionally. In particular, I'm not sure whether it's worth using the shallots. It seems like they could be pretty powerful, but I never really got a good sense on exactly how much damage they were doing.
However, I did decide to plant a missdemandrake, as it seemed nice to be able to zap enemies anywhere on screen occasionally, and I also wondered if there would ever be any enemies with super high health.
Well, it definitely paid off in round 20! My singular missdemandrake basically handled the UWO by herself.
At that point, only a handful of towers had died, so I had like $2000 or so. So, in round 21, when a bunch of towers did get killed, I basically just started planting more missdemandrakes... and I won! Hooray.
(continued...)
Eventually, however, I got used to just right clicking as soon as I was done with a plant. So, basically just a UI nitpick there. And of course, eventually my towers stopped dying very much at all.
Overall I thought this game was pretty great. I think it's the best of the games I've played so far. I personally thought all the enemy and plant naming was pretty fun, such as the UWO. The graphics were great, as mentioned, and I thought the music and sounds were good too. And of course the tower defense concept itself was creative and overall just fun to play with, with a nice variety of towers to try and at least 3 or 4 being pretty useful for a winning strategy. So, great job!
Nice vibe here with several upgrades to follow, and a feel that mashed up bits I've seen in different genres, like a little tower defense, a little clicker upgrade, a little missile command... it was nice!
Most fun game i've played so far this jam. I did have to refresh the page after the game froze once, as I was placing a shallot head; so It felt a little hairy when the big barley bucks were rolling in and performance took a hit, but after some mouse-waving to collect it all, all was well. Nice job, enjoyed it a lot!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xT8P0Yjk5Wg