Dungeon of the Dragon by Ellie Rasmussen

[raw]
made by Ellie Rasmussen for Ludum Dare 52 (JAM)

A dragon's hoard is a fickle thing. It must be defended from adventurers, and yet the gold those adventurers bring is the very thing that lets it grow. Too many brave heroes and your treasure gets taken away. Too few, and it is left forgotten to the sands of time.

Dungeon of the Dragon is a tower defense game in which you play as a dragon designing the perfect dungeon. Your goal is not necessarily to kill all who enter, rather to maintain the delicate balance of a challenge which would-be heroes think they can pass. Those who escape with gold in hand will spread word of your treasure throughout the kingdom, attracting more foolhardy adventurers into your trap.

Ratings

Given 9🗳️ 10🗨️

Feedback

SoonTheSpoon
09. Jan 2023 · 20:20 UTC
Interesting idea with the reputation! Trap system is fun and I would have wanted to place all the traps, but couldn't, because reputation would plummet... Game does not have the best performance for some reason. Nice work!
williewlchew
09. Jan 2023 · 21:48 UTC
As a fan of tower defense games, I loved the concept of the game! Not very harvesty though.
Heho
09. Jan 2023 · 22:08 UTC
Quite an interesting twist on the tower defense genre. The graphics are well made, but sadly the coins seem to induce a lot of lag. Still a very fine game.
SvenErik
10. Jan 2023 · 12:21 UTC
Very neat idea, the game itself is fun and I can see it being possibly expanded in several directions with new features. Sadly it runs quite slow at times, so took a long time to test it for me. Still managed to do it~ I'm on a linux machine, so the download link didn't help with it. I love the concept of holding a balance there~

Overall good one, I hope you continue to working at least a bit on it, perhaps a small post-ludum update.
Odey
10. Jan 2023 · 15:26 UTC
I like tower defenses where you have to trap the tiles, so you had me sold on that! Some interesting concepts such as reputation and nice SFX overall (it does feel good to impale those petty thieves). As some people mentioned, the game can get a bit laggy, and I feel that some buttons can be a bit annoying.

Good job nonetheless!
Tesseract
10. Jan 2023 · 23:10 UTC
I liked this game - finding a balance where you kill some of the adventurers but not all of them is challenging. The reputation does seem to swing backwards and forwards since a dungeon that kills any of the strongest adventurers will kill almost all of the weaker ones. It did feel like it was hard to react to anything - when you need to place another trap, you don't have any money and there doesn't seem to be any way to remove traps when you want more adventurers to escape - this means I spent most of the time just watching and hoping that my traps would kill that last adventurer.
theHerborist
11. Jan 2023 · 20:13 UTC
Interesting take. A bit heavy on ye ol'browser though, at least for me. I liked the concept behind it, but the performance took a lot from it. Also some theme music/ambient sound could help with the enjoyment I think

Could use some more love, in my opinion, more than the 2-3 days of the jam can afford it
Sisyphean Games
11. Jan 2023 · 21:41 UTC
Nice!

Killing a guy who stole a bunch of my gold and getting my gold back was super satisfying. I also appreciate the different sound effects for the different traps. The balancing of the traps and their cost seems a little off but it's a game jam and that's to be expected.

Well done!
chompdev
14. Jan 2023 · 20:24 UTC
Whoa, this is such a cool idea! Lots of great little details in your design here. I really like that adventurers gain some health when they reach the treasure room, as if gaining some hope and a second wind. There's a really cool strategic element of building your defenses up slowly as the adventurers get steadily stronger, but not just spending all your gold on defenses too soon.

I love the mechanic where you can only spend gold if it's in your treasure room, so there's this balance between spending occasionally and saving some for adventurers to find in order to maintain your reputation. The animation/sound of gold dropping back into your treasure pile is so good! It really nails that Diablo 1 and 2 gold pile vibe. It's really cool how adventurers only take as much gold as they can personally carry (maybe based on their own strength/HP stat?).

I survived until almost 1,200 rounds, and I'm looking forward to beating that high score soon!
![score36.PNG](///raw/044/42/z/5671e.png)