Forresto by Weywocketer
THE BIRDS ARE EVIL AND YOU ARE HERE TO STOP THEM
Thank you for checking out our game! This is our first submission here, and we hope you like it. All of the sounds and music were created by us, and the graphic assets used are in the credits menu. We certainly enjoyed making Forresto, and it might not be perfect, but we hope you enjoy playing it. If you do, make sure to rate it. Thanks!
How to play
In the world of Forresto you've been given a task to defend the planets from the army of evil, planet-hungry birds. When you click a slot on a planet, a menu will appear. There are four type of trees you can plant on a planet:
- Resource making tree tier 1 (It will grow quite quickly and the more it has grown the more money you will get by harvesting it)
- Resource making tree tier 2 (It will grow slower than the tier one, but it will yield more money after being harvested)
- Shooting tree tier 1 (Use it to defend against first waves, the more it grows, the faster it shoots, non-harvestable)
- Shooting tree tier 2 (This is your main tree used to defend against evil birds, it shoots projectiles that don't get destroyed when they hit an enemy, non-harvestable)
You can look around with WASD keys (use Shift to move faster) and zoom in and out using mouse scroll wheel.
All planets have health points, and losing it is indicated by dimming the light of the planet. Once it's light goes dark, the planet is consumed by the birds. When all of the planets are consumed, the evil birds win, and they fly happily knowing that you failed.
Forresto takes about 5–10 minutes to play, but if you last longer, make sure to let us know in the comments!
About us
We are a team of ~~tree~~ three based in Poland. We only recently started making games, and Forresto is our first public game ever, but we can assure you it won't be the last ;) It was lots of fun to make, and we are excited to see what the future brings.
| Link | https://weywocketer.itch.io/forresto |
| Link | https://weywocketer.itch.io/forresto |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/52/forresto |
Ratings
| Overall | 389th | 3.522⭐ | 25🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 172th | 3.783⭐ | 25🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 206th | 3.614⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 377th | 3.761⭐ | 25🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 307th | 3.333⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 55th | 3.974⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 480th | 3.341⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 26🗳️ | 22🗨️ |
## My score
I think I did pretty good!
- Time: **6m 48s**
- Harvests: **93 trees**
- Kills: **874 birds**
- Money: **$1396**
## Feedback
### Game
Good tower (tree?) defense game!
Harvesting trees was **fun and thematically appropriate**!
Not sure why my golden trees never got any snow on them, though.
**Graphics were nice, but not very consistent**: birds and planets had a completely different style...
Did two different people work on them? :wink:
The ***Shooting tree tier 1* was pretty much useless** even in the early game, it never managed to hit anything :sweat_smile:
The huge waves of birds that started spawning in the late game were really nice to see, but obviously impossible to defend against. A **good endgame overall**!
The sounds were **awfully loud and nonsensical**.
_My poor ears..._ :sob:
### Distribution
Thanks for **providing a HTML5 build**!
Since I am playing on Linux, I appreciated it!
However I've encountered a couple of problems in the gameplay itself. The first one being that for about two minutes I didn't even realize that you can scroll the mouse wheel to zoom out and see all of the planets. Maybe it's just me, but perhaps it's worth adding this point to the game description here and on the itch page just in case.
The second problem was that at some point I just couldn't put down any more trees. But it happened in the late game near the 5 minute mark, so it's not a big deal.
I quite liked the way you made it so that a single planet on it's own can't really shoot birds off itself and that all the planets should rely on shooting birds off each other to last longer - a nice message about cooperation and helping each other in difficult times.
Also congrats on finishing your first publicly available game! It's small and simple, but a good one to start your gamedev journey with, more complex and ambitious projects surely are waiting for you in the future.
Some negatives: the voice lines for sound effects were funny, but *way* too loud. I turned the volume up to hear the great music better, but then the first sound effect made me jump :pensive: It also wasn't clear enough as to what each plant did, so I had no way to properly make decisions. There also was just too much for me to try to keep track of; I had to constantly scroll around the screen looking for birds since there was no UI warning me where they were (though I *think* the red line at the edge of the screen told me the direction they were coming from?), I had to constantly check my plants to see if I could harvest them, and there were too many planets to manage them all at once...
Some positives: Music was great and the base concept was great! I really would like to see a future version of this with original art and more intuitive RTS controls and UI get made and released!
Interesting take on the theme and tower defense gender.
I quickly ended up player zoomed out as much as possible not to miss anything, but it's harder to place trees then and appreciate buttons.
Maybe you could use the angle when a planet is selected to and not require the cursor to be on the surface to place trees.
Basically, not having to move the camera around + zoom in/out would allow to better appreciate the action I think.
Overall, nice entry! Especially for a first one!
Here's the last screenshot I got:
Great job making your first public game! It plays very smooth (other than the rash :grin: ), and generally looks, plays and feels nice! :slight_smile:
The main issue I had with it is that it felt really frustrating most of all, as I had no way to control where the gun trees would shoot and paired with planets turning extremely slowly + really high cost for trees + SO MANY BIRDS coming made it feel hopeless from the start, which quickly turned into a "lets see how long it takes them to eat all my planets" waiting game.
Another small issue would be that birds "attached" to planets in such a way that if they would turn to the "dark side" of a planet you had no way of shooting them until the planet turned back around. Not a big deal if you had lots of guns, but they were just too costly.
Even just having trees be much cheaper (ie: 5$ for tier 1, 10-15$ tier 2 trees) would have made it feel much more fun and challenging, as you had more trees to be placed down from the start and it would be more fun to place them around strategically and fight on the birds on more fair grounds, so to speak. Alternatively, a replay mode with a much higher sum of starting money would also be a cool idea.
One last piece of advice: placing trees on the edge of planets felt a bit too slow. Perhaps selecting which trees to place first and then clicking on various planets to place them would feel quicker and snappier.
Lastly, a timer after which you "win" the game would also be nice to have as that would give the player an objective from the start: survive for x minutes.
Big congrats on your first jam AND game!