Tile King by MiltonNH25
You are the new king of the barren Land of Tiles, for as long as you can keep paying that is.
Tile King is a chill tile building game. Your goal is to survive as long as possible by gathering enough gold to make payments every ten turns. To do this, you must harvest the natural resources by constructing different building on top of the different types of tiles. Beware the ever increasing costs to both building and your payments.


*Note: The small update version of the game has been included on the itch page which fixes the negative money issues and the rare tile placement crash along with the QOL changes of lowering the music and allowing the player to sell all of a resource at a shop
Controls:
LMB: Select and Build Tiles
RMB: Trade at a Shop and Cancel Building
Middle Mouse: Drag Screen
| Link | https://miltonnh25.itch.io/tile-king |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/52/tile-king |
Ratings
| Overall | 222th | 3.761⭐ | 25🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 131th | 3.87⭐ | 25🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 209th | 3.609⭐ | 25🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 191th | 4.043⭐ | 25🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 679th | 2.739⭐ | 25🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 495th | 2.261⭐ | 25🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 671th | 1.917⭐ | 20🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 481th | 3.333⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 17🗳️ | 24🗨️ |
I have some criticism though. I think it would be great to have a "Sell all" feature, at some point you have to right click so much that it takes up most of your turn just to sell everything you need to get the money to survive. I also once somehow managed to pay the money I owed even though I didn't have it all and started the next turn with -5 gold. Finally, I think the music takes too much focus away from the game. You have to strategize and make decisions and the music is a bit distracting. Maybe a softer soundtrack or just ambient sounds would work better here.
Gold went to -15 so I should have lost even though nothing happened. The music is good, but maybe some accompaniment makes it even better and a little less repetitive.
The only thing dragging it down was the music. I think it would be better to have some sound effects for various actions rather than a very bare bones song that you cannot mute.
Well done! :star:
Innovation: The fog of war and lighthouse tile were unique, I have definitely played other games similar to this one but I don't recall having this much fog of war, and thus a lighthouse to clear it. One way to make the game more innovative would be to double down on the fog of war and have certain building that don't clear the fog, but gain resources from it.
Theme: Excellent use of the theme, the core of the game was about harvesting resources, and everything in the game helped facilitate harvesting. One idea to make the game more thematic would be to add more mechanisms to improve harvesting like tile upgrades, or boosts to harvest more per turn.
Graphics: The graphics were neat and consistent throughout the game. I think changing the road tiles to be a "+" shape (or ideally a different shape depending on whether it was next to other roads) would look a lot better than filling the whole tile with the stone brick pattern.
Audio: The melody of the song was okay, but the sound the instrument used was very shrill to me and made it difficult to listen to. I would suggest using a softer / quieter instrument for such a simple song, and add more sound effects to the different actions the player takes in the game.
I would love to see a volume slider or toggle as I did find it a bit piercing but generally it was nice and chill! Another thing I would like to see is the ability to keep placing the same tile without having to go back and select it again which would help with building roads and such.
Overall, great little game and a nice way to pass the time!
You are on the right path for sure, keep it up.
The game is very fun though. I think it's quite solid, but needs some tweaking. Avoiding your road getting blocked is a bit annoying. Also you die if you would have enough at the end of your turn. The mechanics are fun and work well together, the lighthouse creates an exploration-exploitation tradeoff. The only useless resource is fish which I converted all the time for gold. It would be cool to have a bulldozer so I could remove my lighthouses or unmess my road.
Well done anyways !

Mecanics are simple, but not so easy to stay alive for a long time.
Good work !
A couple of minor things, it would have been really nice to be able to zoom in/out, if you could purchase multiple buildings in a row without needing to click the buttons again, and I also think the music was a bit ominous sounding for a game like this. Otherwise, great job!
So I started another round and realized the starting tiles are randomized per run. This might be common for the genre, but may I point out a flaw as a newbie? My first run had no water tiles in the starting area, which meant I had no way to gain fish, which meant I couldn't build a lighthouse to reveal further tiles. Maybe the start area should be static so you can give players an "easy" start, and then randomize as it expands outwards?
On my next playthroughs I kept restarting until I had a gold mine and water in the starting area, which felt like a much more friendly start. After that, the game kept me playing through quite a few restarts, trying out new starting strategies, is it better to go for the town or the gold mine first, etc. Definitely got into it after a while, so I think all the frustration was simply on me not having played games like this before. Thanks for introducing me!