Tree of Life

by wolar

co-authored: @adamlysak, @drlizard, @matejfiala, @zuzupd

Overall★★★★★★★★★★4.00

Fun★★★★★★★★★★3.94

Innovation★★★★★★★★★★2.85

Theme★★★★★★★★★★3.98

Graphics★★★★★★★★★★4.08

Humor★★★★★★★★★★3.02

Mood★★★★★★★★★★3.61

Story:

You, a freshly sprouted young tree, will you be able to grow up and become a magnificent big tree. Nature is cruel and some inhabitants around you want to feed on your life force. You have to carefully split your life energy between growth (not spending it) and staying alive.

How to Play:

It's basically a tower defence but any life force you don't spend during the level (wave) is added to you maximum life force at the end of each level (and you will grow!). The life force is then replenished to the full amount, so saving as much life force as possible in each level is a good thing to do!

Controls:

WASD / Arrow Keys Move camera around

QE RotateCamera

Left Mouse Button Select Tower / Build Tower

Right Mouse Button Cancel Building

CTRL / CMD + Q Quit game any time

Team:

Martin Novák - Coding

Ondřej Dovec - Animations, Enemy Design, Food Delivery

Lukáš Tůma - Level Design

Adam Lysák - Coding

Matěj Fiala - 3D Models, 2D Graphics

Wolar Games (Our company) - Web | Twitter | Facebook

Tools:

Unity, Photoshop, Amplify Photo, Blender, 3DMax, Audacity, DoTween (Unity Plugin)

Notes:

This time we worked for around 28 hours in total (14 hours per day, 2 days)

We did not create all the Audio (we have downloaded music and some sound effects) so we opt-out Audio category. Music was downloaded from https://www.bensound.com/royalty-free-music. We have also not created fonts.

Tools: 3ds Max, Adobe Photoshop, Audacity, Blender, DOTween, Unity

Comments27

shadowhaxz0r30 Apr 2019, 20:22

Nice clean graphics, solid mechanics, cool ludum game! Music also fits well.

30 Apr 2019, 20:27

Really well done tower defense game.

johnnydalvi30 Apr 2019, 20:31

love the graphics and it's a quite well executed game, congratulations to the devs. Curiousily enough, my team also made a game with a similar idea, although we approached it in a different manner, would be nice to have you trying our entry as well:
https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/44/heart-of-the-grove

MrsTari30 Apr 2019, 20:33

sweet graphic - really good mechanic - awesome job. i dont have any problems. :hearts: :dragon_face:

Ausstein30 Apr 2019, 20:33

Wow really good game, nice take on the theme and overall very polished. I beat it on the second try after realizing it is wise to not spend a lot of life since it keeps adding up then. Score was 605 :)

cozmic30 Apr 2019, 20:40

I really like the artstyle, except for the ground - this just seems a little off to the overall style.
Other than that it's a solid tower defense game nicely fitting for the theme!
Nothing that's really needed, but I would've liked to be able to control everything with the mouse, so dragging the world / rotating with middle button or something like that would've been a nice feature!

jk500030 Apr 2019, 20:50

This overall a really good tower defence game.

wolarauthor30 Apr 2019, 20:53

@shadowhaxz0r, @mrstari Thank you for nice feedback

@johnnydalvi Thank you, I will check your game tomorrow :)

@ausstein Thank you for playing our game, we had exactly this problem when playtesting the game on random friends (that they didn't save any life and lost because of it) so we have noted it everywhere we could but by that time it was too late to change gameplay or make better tutorial

@cozmic Thank you for feedback, we are very much aware of that ground issue, it was probably a little bit misscomunication within the team and we didn't have time (or maybe energy and will) to fix it. I agree that mouse controls would be nice but we had so much stuff to do (I think we have overscoped a little bit) so we had to cut it.

Hyperbian Games30 Apr 2019, 20:54

Very well executed, the theme plays into the game very well. It was fun to balance wanting to spend health, and wanting to bank it, the tension between the two felt very well balanced. Furthest I got was wave 8, but I had a blast playing.

Ausstein30 Apr 2019, 21:04

@wolar I like it the way it is, that you have to figure it out and dont get pushed too far in that direction. Otherwise it would have been too easy in my opinion, so great job :)

kostasvs30 Apr 2019, 22:51

Very well done game and well polished, looks great and plays well!

sillyman9871 May 2019, 15:20

Cool!

Johannimations1 May 2019, 15:30

Great tower defence game. Was always really exiting to watch the waves attack. Its very wwell ballanced, and fits the theme. But i would love to have a quit button in the game. I really enjoyedthe fitting audio and visual style. Gameplayy was really engaging and diversity. But i think tower defence is not a really inovativ genre, and frankly had the feeling that you didn't add much new into the mix.

Xankill3r1 May 2019, 15:31

Very well polished game :smile:

lina1 May 2019, 23:00

Funny game, liked especially the idea of adding the left health to the new :D

Lakrits1 May 2019, 23:03

This was enjoyable and the mechanics fits the theme perfectly. Best game I've tried so far this Ludum!

Megan Kozun2 May 2019, 18:22

Pretty fun and easy to understand/play. Everything worked great and no bugs (haha) that i encountered, and the game looks and feels pretty polished. Great work!

RAC-Games2 May 2019, 19:14

Awesome game! I really liked it and played till I won.
The camera drives were used well and the controls were nicely chosen. I liked that in contrast some other tower defense games I played before, you could zoom and turn around.
The animations were on point, watching these plants was really fun.
They are, however, a bit hard to distinguish, once they are placed.
The menu was beautiful, but could have used some more features.

KreGames3 May 2019, 20:50

Pretty awesome game. Really enjoyed it! Nice art, sounds! Great work :thumbsup:

Adam Elaoud3 May 2019, 23:12

Wow! This was super fun! Really cute graphics and sound effects and an overall great atmosphere - very relaxing and casual. My biggest criticisms are that the camera controls are a little wonky, it would've felt more natural to be able to move with the mouse (click and drag) and that there wasn't much differentiation between the towers (it was hard to tell what I had placed and what areas needed more support). Overall though, excellent job!

IvanPavlov4 May 2019, 10:00

Awesome and captivating! Replayable.

Pincushion4 May 2019, 14:46

Really fun game. The selection of weapons was good, and they were well balanced. The controls were smooth. You didn't make the music or font, but you picked really good ones that went really well with the game. I really liked the animation and path indicator when a new cave opened up.

Copper_Aardvark_Games4 May 2019, 22:25

Great graphics and gameplay, great entry. ;)

Franciszek Pyrć5 May 2019, 07:56

I've played this game in a video.

I love tower defense games and I had a great time playing this.

Bajtix5 May 2019, 10:09

This game is really nice! I really liked the idea of a tree defending itself against bugs. However, I think the camera controls are too slow [zooming in/out]. In my opinion, the player should have more control over the camera's movement.

Duke5 May 2019, 20:42

Too bad tower defense games aren't my cup of tea, because this looks really fun. Very polished style (art and sound) and interesting twist on the genre. Well done!

AwesomeAlliterationAlliance5 May 2019, 22:29

First tower defense game I played this Ludum Dare and I really enjoyed it! The variety in weapons and enemies was impressive, especially with all the cute animations. ^^
The mechanic of adding remaining lifeforce to the max lifeforce was intriguing.
I tried it multiply times, but couldn't make it past the wave where the third rock gets opened.
Despite my lack of skill, I very much enjoyed this entry. Nice work!

Other games by @wolar

★4.10

★3.40

★3.73