Our underwater colony builder, Tidehold, is our little love letter to strategy games I spent hundreds of hours in - and few of its features were heavily inspired by other titles. Every time I participated in LD before, I ended up playing many strategy games other people made and telling myself: "damn, I wish I made something like this!". So, this time, we came prepared with a wish to somehow wiggle a strategy genre into the final theme - I wrote down my ideas for each of the 10 themes on Friday, figuring out how to make them fit.

Main inspiration for the grid-based map and simple resource management was an amazing game I played lately, which I can't recommend enough: Dawnfolk, made by one guy in Godot, same engine that we use. In our game, you have to expand your base using O2 tanks in order to reach the final point: a portal to the new, better lands. The mechanic of reaching further with linked buildings of the same type was inspired by another amazing game, They Are Billions, where smart placement of electric beacons expands your base to reach best narrow defense spots. Finally, we needed a simple endgame scenario, some goal that players could aim for. The idea for the portal you have to reach was inspired by the classic: the first map of Settlers 2 that I played hundreds of times as a kid. On that map, you need to simply expand your base north in order to reach the final destination. Our portal has a random location, but the idea stands.

Hope you enjoy playing Tidehold! We appreciate your feedback, ratings and even few minutes spent in our game :)