LDjam 56: Theme- Tiny Creatures

I had a good time playing this! The art was super cute and I got hyper focused on clicking everything. :D

Nice game, simple and sweet. Artstyle is solid, gameplay is nice and intuitive. Good job all around

Really fun! Loved how you could "animate" the nuts without actually animating them, that was clever. I felt it was a little easy, and once I got to level 9 or 10 it seemed like it broke and it didn't spawn any enemies. But overall, very fun! good job!!!

This is super fun. The amount of content here with the different upgrades and units is really impressive. I made the mistake of spending all my currency on peanuts going into the second wave and sent them all to attack a single squirel...

@oysterhey Thank you for playing and I'm happy to hear you got that far in the game! I think I know exactly what happened when things stopped spawning. I bet that there were seed piles just off-screen at the bottom edge that needed to be collected in order to kick off the next wave. I wish I had a chance to do something about it before the end of the jam!

Genuinely got hooked on this for a while, great job. Wonderful art as well! A small thing I noticed was that I think the price for the peanut has a typo as it says 150 but only costs 50.

@jacobloon wow, good catch lol- I can't believe that slipped through! I did intend for it to cost 150, but I definitely think 50 is more balance so I suppose it worked out.

Nice

This was one of the best so far! Everything ties up so neatly, and I had fun beating a couple of waves. I like the simplicity of the gameplay - it doesn't always have to be complex and multi-layered for it to be enjoyable. Very good job!

Ended up playing this game for a pretty long time. It was really fun, and i absolutely love the cute graphics. The gameplay got a bit repetitive, but i really enjoyed playing it.

very impressively put together game! the graphics and ui are so clean and satisfying, and everything is so cute (and fits the theme so well). inspiring stuff!

Wooa got hooked big time, very cool gameplay loop! Well done <3
Two tiny things I would've loved:
- Not have the quit button where you would expect a "back to game" button, bottom left of the upgrade menu. I quitted after wave 2 the first time, very frustrating! Just add a confirmation panel if you really want to let it here
- A way to make sure you don't start a wave with not enough resources to send troops... but maybe that's intended! Felt bad finally upgrading to lose because I couldn't afford a single unit.

Excellent submission, really. Well done again and thanks for the fun provided <3

I had a lot of fun trying your game !

The gameplay is smooth and interesting and graphics are very nicely done.

I really liked the tutorial you included at the beginning that was really clear and made the whole game easy to understand without any issue. I like when people find time to do that kind of details in a game jam !

The only negative is that I found the difficulty a little bit too easy.

A great entry, congrats !

It was fun playing your game. It took me a couple tried before I figured out I was maxed out at sending 12 at a time for any type. Really nice game, thanks for making it.

Really had me hooked. Love that you got a variety of nut allies and squirrel enemies, kept the rounds engaging.

Little pet peeve was that the acorn allies to choose from were right on the castle, felt like it was really cluttered once all of them were bought. Maybe having them in a bar in one of the corners would've cleared that up? Love how the castle grew and added buildings as they units were bought!

Art style was super good and everything matched the aesthetic you had going! Loved playing your game!

This game is NUTS haahahahaahha, great job, so good game and arts is great!

My finger is dying haha!

The core design of this is great! I love how incremental it feels and how game is natural flow to it has when it comes to learning new mechanics. Every time I feel like game became too hard I know it's time to change strategy and try different approach and then.. it works! Different units, specific upgrades, picking up seeds with specialized units, it just creates feeling of natural not forced progression. This is not an easy feat to achieve.. and you did it!

I feel like this game really needs some improvements for UX. After I switched to pressing spacebar, I was frequently missclicking on the unit selection box and in the end I was sending army of expensive fighters to pickup seed and such. Instead of spacebar I would love to have keybinds for specific units like [1]/[2]/[3]/[4] or something, that way would be able to send specific unit where I want every time.

Another UX problem I encountered was in the very late game. It was hard to select between seed and enemy. An example of how it could be solved would be simple toggle under a key that allows for selecting only seed/enemy based on the last thing that was hovered with cursor when pressed like this:
1. hover on the seed/enemy -> 2. spacebar -> 3. now you can hover only seeds/enemies -> 4. spacebar -> 5. now you can hover everything again.

I think something like this would allow for avoiding missclicks in the late game.

But outside of those small issues.. overall it's a fantastic entry! Entire game is designed around one simple concept but because it's so well balanced and polished I definitely had fun playing that one. Thank you for making this!

Great game, had a lot of fun with this one. Loved the art, music, upgrades are pretty good. I found switching between units a little annoying, but that could be fixed by binding the a number to each unit (e.g. "1" for acorn, "2" for peanut, etc.). Otherwise great game :)

@manabreak Hello, thank you so much for playing and I'm glad you enjoyed!

@zype Very happy to hear this game was engaging! I can certainly thank my teammate for the great art :)

@ryab Thank you so much! It took us way too long to find something to fit the theme but I think that time was spent well!

@laywelin Thank you! You are absolutely right about the quit button, no question about it- that's one area where playtesting would have helped. And I totally agree on setting an upgrade-spending limit which still allows you to send troops after upgrading.

@furano Thanks for the comment, glad the tutorial helped! I usually prefer to have the gameplay speak for itself as a tutorial, but I think it made sense here. I agree about the difficulty, but based on my past jams I decide to err on the side of 'easy' rather than 'difficult,' but it could totally use some rebalancing!

@paulhocker Very happy you enjoyed! So there is a 4-unit limit per squirrel, but there is no general limit at all :)

@jj-cruikshanks Thank you for playing, and I'm very glad you liked it! You're right that the UI got cluttered, our thought was that if the buttons are in the middle, it would be less likely for the buttons to get in the way of trying to click a squirrel, since they can never overlap with the base. But I think you're right that having a side bar is better. Even if I try to click a squirrel by the side bar and fail, at least that squirrel is still far away.

@metriko Wow, I'm very grateful for your thorough comment! I wish I could give you multiple likes :)
The UI was definitely a big area where things could have been improved. Keybinds (1,2,3,4) are a natural choice for unit switching, and would have worked well. I think when considering targeting seeds vs squirrels, in the interest of simplicity, perhaps most units can preferentially target squirrels when they overlap with seeds, and only the almonds preferentially target seeds when they overlap with squirrels. Lots of options to consider and I'm glad I didn't make a platformer because there were new and interesting challenges with a game like this which I learned a lot from!

@master-age Thank you for the kind comment! I definitely agree with the (1,2,3,4) for unit-switching, would have been a great addition. Alas!