Planet Quest by Corporation
You were sent to the planet to look for resources
Order delivery of defensive structures.

Use cruiser on the orbit for powerful attacks.

Upgrade cruiser to defend longer.

Gameplay guide and hints:
Game is not easy, here's some tips if you're stuck: place buildings in the begining carefuly, you will need fire power and protection. Good pattern is turret behind the wall. Don't be greedy to place credits miner early, you will get overwhelmed. Place rocket launcher as soon as possible, after a couple of turrets, it will help you with big enemies and is mandatory to kill flying. After that a good idea is to place mines thrower behind the wall and wave generator to the left, it will kill enemies in mass and keep them from destroying defensive structures. Place buildings on top of each other to replace them when they are almost broken or just weak, like walls or upgrading turrets with mines thrower. The game is winnable so you can do it)
More
I have plans to continue development of this game, will post more stuff in twitter (https://twitter.com/FiveHeadGames).
Credits:
Game created using my own engine (https://github.com/filscorporation/Steel). All art created using Aseprite.
Ratings
| Overall | 49th | 4.027⭐ | 39🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 32th | 4.153⭐ | 38🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 207th | 3.319⭐ | 38🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 294th | 3.528⭐ | 38🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 61th | 4.139⭐ | 38🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 81th | 3.729⭐ | 37🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 59th | 3.875⭐ | 38🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 29🗳️ | 49🗨️ |
Using my own engine is really has it's pros and cons: the game isn't performance intensive, so no real benefits here, but where it does matter is the overall flow of work - it supports a lot of shortcuts and instruments that can increase the speed of me making games, like full aseprite integration, that alows me to get all animations right from .aseprite file without import.
But at the same time there's a lot of fighting with missing features and bugs when using it, and you can't just google the answer like you would with Unity
- It seems turrets are incapable of killing an enemy without taking damage. This didn't feel great as a player, but I understand if this was a gameplay decision
- I couldn't figure out if there was a way to cancel a building once I clicked on it. It would be nice if this was a feature.
- It was not obvious at first that dropping new buildings on existing buildings would destroy them. This caused me to accidentally set myself back quite a bit.
Overall I had a lot of fun with this! Love the concept, felt like the right level of difficulty, and the art is awesome. Excellent work!
Yes, the turret should take damage, that's why you need the walls asap) Canceling buildings unfortunately was not implemented, you can click new building and it will replace current draft, but you will lose money for the first one. I tried to warn about it in the dialogs, in the game description and also by drawing red cross on top of the building you are going to replace.
I hope learning curve was not too steep and you managed to beat the game)
The gameplay is solid and strategic. After a few attempts I figured out that it's a good strategy to use wall + weapon delivery to clear large swarms of enemies. And the simultaneous delivery is the key upgrade to this play style.
As mentioned by others, the palette is great and it really goes well with the other parts of the game. I also like the mood switching between the spaceship and planet surface. Nice work!
Love the camera movement when clicking on the ship.
Would be great to see:
- ability to cancel the choice of the order before placing if I change my mind
- upgrades for buildings
- building's health bars, range info/visualisaion
- difficulty choices (too easy for a guy like me). After the first try I came up with a strategy which leaded me to the victory pretty easily
- maybe different colors for enemies to distingwish them more easily
Keep up the good work!
Some of your points match what I've ended up thinking after the game was done: the initial idea with delayed placement requires much more of balancing to make this game unique, I think I'll work on it.
And rocket launchers can hit any enemy, they just prioritise them in specific order (flying-tank-others) to not waste rockets on the weak ones.
Beat the whole thing, was a whole lot of fun!
Sound, art, animations, everything was so good!
Intro/tutorial was really good, straight to the point!
I can't believe I got left behind :,(
Thanks for this game!
Game was pretty hard until I realized that with all ship upgrades I can spam the hell out of the laser attack and kill everything. I pulled myself back from the brink of destruction this way lol
The ship music was a little hectic but the sound overall is really nice.
@the-hat-guy amazing to hear! Seems like the difficulty was perfect for you then)
@lex 100% is the ending, yes, you won) But there was a dialog in the end explaining what happened next. Anyways glad you finished the game)
@firespike33 thanks for suggestions, they are all matching the feedback I hear and something I will implement for sure.
@kierogi glad you enjoyed) I was affraid it would be too long for the jam, not it's about 10 minutes to complete, more would be risky. Good suggestion with big enemy in the final stages, agreed that after you made a setup you can just spam attacks and chill)
So much love clearly went into this project - I adored all the enemy designs, and had a tremendously fun time learning each of my tools, and deploying them in just the right orientation to form an impressive bullwark.
\- of course, until my capitalist masters left me for dead, that is!
Right at the end, that epic flood of enemies was just barley what I was able to keep up with, giving me the joy of calling successive laser sweeps and a satisfying hail of misses to decimate their numbers. The perfect amount of challenge for our final showdown!
Using the 'deliver time' as a core aspect of the difficulty was a genius idea, and shows what a strength the theme can be when considered carefully - excellent work there.
And the color pallet can't be praised highly enough - it gives such a distinct, harrowing beauty to this game that perfectly fits the themes and pace of gameplay. Zipping up to the mothership, leaving the gentle pastel hills and atmospheric music below, and witnessing the industrial, grating might of the corporation that sent me - it just works wonderfully to deliver that emotional impact.
"Who is the _real_ enemy", as they say.
Astonished to see this was 'compo'. A brilliant entry! I enjoyed every moment of it. You should be very proud!
Very glad you noticed the story and how the mood shifts when switching to the ship view, that's something I really tryed to achieve.
I loved everything about this game. The scope was beautifully handled, you have a very good sense of which building blocks are important to finish a game and where to allocate resources, which is also appropriate as you made a resource-based tower defense!
The colours you picked were great, they added a lot to the atmosphere and mood, music was great as well. The addition of jumping between the surface and the spaceship was a fantastic addition that did a lot in regards of adding a sense of scale. It's hard to describe it, but it did a lot for the feel.
I managed completing the whole game in the first try, much thanks to reading your tips prior to starting the game, I know I would've perished otherwise as I'm always greedy in these types of games and start with resource gathering.
Gameplay, story, art, music, it all comes together. Cannot emphasize it enough, you've really made a balanced, great, complete game which is really enjoyable. All of it is extra impressive considering you did all of this yourself during a compo, applause, applause, and more applause!
One thing which I kind of forgot was the upgrades I could buy from the spaceship. Maybe it was just me, but maybe the fact that the button was on the other side of the screen made me completely forget about it. When I remembered I could buy stuff I realized those upgrades are really helpful :P
At first I was also thinking that it might have been nice to give your buildings some healthbar or some change of art to indicate how broken they are. Now, however, I am not entirely sure what would be the right call, because not letting the player know this gives another dimension of the risk/reward decisions.
One final thing I noticed is that, in moments of stress, I would accidentally place one building on top of the other (which would then be destroyed.) I was wondering, is there a reason to allow the player to place one building on top of another? Maybe just not allowing the player to place buildings on top of each other would suit just as well?
Anyway, thank you very much for making this! I really enjoyed it a lot :D Amazing submission and really impressive for a compo game!
Also, it's really neat that you're using your own engine.
I also like the take on the theme, its not as straightforward, making it more interesting.
One thing I didnt like is that the rockets poof when their target is destroyed. Meaning synced up rocket launchers caused some loss of structures.
Played three times, beat it in the end. Could use a fast forward as well.
This kind of retro art goes straight to the heart... several colors... reminds me of those very old computers and gaming systems and **great** gameplay! Thank you for bringing this back / I may be a bit oldschool...