This is my second LD and I've got to say the thing that LD teaches you the most is time management. In my first LD I didn't spend enough time on tutorial so I wanted to change that with this game, but ironically the tutorials in this game lack vital parts of information like building effects making them no as useful as I hoped they would be, leading me to the main problem. I didn’t spend enough time to game test, many easy to fix issues would be fixed if I only spend enough time on game testing. So this is my main takeaway for next LD, definitely spend at least 3 hours before getting to shipping on just game testing.

But it was not all bad. I am proud of how the game looks, i had a great time recording sounds, I really like the idea. Also i leard how to use (somewhat) sculpting tool in blender.

But there are lots of simple improvement/changes, lost of them aren't in just because of the lack of testing: Highlight the path that enemies take ( that i feel is the worst problem with the game, there is just really hard to see arrow that sometimes it can be offscreen and not visible at all, this also breaks the decision making process for placing towers which should be the main enjoyment points). Make all crystals bigger. Show health bar even when not zoomed out. Add panning when zoomed out and adjustable zoom with scroll wheel. Add death animation to enemies and make them more visible.

There are some interesting techniques i tried with this game. I used texture for the map generation, then in engine i extracted a RGB value of each cube and used it as basic types of land(path, grass, rocks),
Then I added lerp for each color to give the correct material layer for each type (something similar is usually done for landscapes, except using vertex color instead of texture ). This also then gives my ability to use this data for path finding of enemies which is recursive function that precalculates possible paths until it hits the center and throws all other branches away.

All and all i’m glad i made it even though its flawed :gem:.
you can try it here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/45/carillon