MemGuard Tower Defence by Zaphire

Controls
Left click and drag to connect towers to the mainframe.
Right click to disconnect connected buildings

How to play
- Connect towers to the mainframe to power them up
- You can only power as many as your max memory capacity allows
- Kill enemies trying to destroy the mainframe
- Enemies have a chance to drop memory modules that allow for more memory capacity.
See how many waves you can beat!
There are 5 different building types. Progress the waves to unlock them all
| Link | https://zaphire.itch.io/memguard |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/54/memguard-tower-defence |
Ratings
| Overall | 921th | 3.143⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 909th | 2.976⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 565th | 3.357⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 849th | 3.2⭐ | 22🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 884th | 2.033⭐ | 17🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 1020th | 2.676⭐ | 19🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 12🗳️ | 17🗨️ |
It took me a while to understand how "memory" worked, I think it's a bit unintuitive as a resource. The fact that enemies making it through will steal memory quickly turns the game into a death spiral, because all your turrets power off, leaving you defenseless. It would probably be better to decouple HP and memory.
One mishap was right clicking the central power station, which disconnected *everything* and left me completely vulnerable.
That said, it's a very fun experience, I like the different tower types! The long-range ones often miss or hit friendly structures, but still cool effects when they do hit :)
I had a weird bug(?) on my first time playing where the first enemies just didn't die. At all. I then struggled with memory capacity and died. On my second play I made it all the way through to having all towers connected.
Overall a really cool concept - one I would really like to see expanded on.
I hope you had a good jam :) Maybe give my game a try, if you like!
I think if you spent some more time balancing the numbers and waves, this would be very fun. Currently, it seemed like every turret "cost" about 1000 TiB to operate. Because every enemy will not drop memory, it takes time to build up enough to even operate more than one turret.
It's a pretty cool idea to allow the player to switch turrets. I'm not sure if you intended the player to do that during a wave, though. As it plays currently, it is a bit hard to progress!
The visuals and audio were great though, and it feels like with a bit more tuning of the mechanics this would be a really solid little tower defense game with a fun gimmick!
Besides the coupling of damage and your ability to prevent further damage, the delay of turrets coming online made switching defenses during a wave difficult, which I thought otherwise was one of the real innovations in this game.
I will just add that I found the text hard to read, and enemies hard to see.
The game was still fun, good job.
I think that game could end after all towers are on, because after this point, there is nothing to do, other than collecting memorry modules.