A strategy game made for LudumDare46, with the theme "Keep It Alive".
The game takes place in 2157, where words have fallen victim to the free market. Corporations invest in and charge royalties on the usage of certain words. The word "it" has fallen into near obscurity.
You are the Chief Strategist of It Corp. and you will stop at nothing, not even war, to keep "it" alive, and to make "it" thrive.
@kwaku i just played the game through and realized that the difficulty curve is way different than from what i was expecting it to be. I didn't get time to test yesterday, so i just assigned some arbitrary values to the spawning logic, hoping to find the easy, but still challenging sweet spot.
@shikamaru the idea behind the ghost writer was that it would be your payload. I noticed that it was extremely hard for the activists and journalists to break through, and hence the ghost writer was born. The idea was that if you planned well enough to be able to conserve enough battlepoints, you would be rewarded with a guaranteed hit.
How it was supposed to be countered was that if you were trying to spam it, you'd be pummelled by the opponents' activists and authors, but clearly, the enemies' rates of spawning weren't high enough for that.
I was not really sure what to do. I didn't see the button on the right for 5 minutes so i thought changing the billboard text was the whole game at first. Also I think most of the UI is sized super randomly and too small in some cases. I loved the pixel art and the sound. Also the mood was really spot on.
@tomas-selmeci yeah, it was surprising, since it should've been obvious that this game would require a lot of balancing, but I somehow missed it. I'll take it as a learning experience. Thanks for playing the game!
Really fun even though it lacks balancing. With some balancing it would be much more viable I suggest implementing a real BP system for the AI as well and setting up a small finite state machine to control the chances of spawning each type. The game really reminded me of old flash games like Age of War. It may be a good idea to add a queue system like that to balance the melee units as well.
@nameless-ghoul thanks for the great feedback! I'm also glad that someone recognised the age of war influence. I used to play a lot of flash games and two games in particular had influence on this game: Age of War and Stick Wars.
About the AI, the bp system and state machine do exist, it's just that they're not well tuned due to lack of time. How it works is, each level has an AI behaviour data structure associated with it, containing BP/s, Tower health, a list of spawnables (a data structure containing unit type, stats and mean seconds per appearance), aggressiveness, max spawns per spawn opportunity, spawn spacing.
I won't get into the details of it, it's quite a messy bit of logic, but it works pretty well (if tuned properly).
I'm currently working on a post jam version. After playing through stick wars to understand why it feels balanced, I also thought about putting a queue system in place. I decided (out of laziness) to instead have the units spawn a few units behind the tower, causing the same outcome. I've also shrunk the no man's land to 1/4th it's size, since the long stretch made it very hard to penetrate to the tower with any unit other than the ghostwriter.
Sorry for the slight rant. Again, thanks for the great feedback!
Hi! The game works well, looks good, sounds good. I thought that the best thing about it was its premise, it was funny and ridiculous. I think it would make sense if the gameplay involved words somehow. Good work, have a nice day.
@xmatos I agree! For a game named verbose, there's a glaring lack of words (besides the (not very) phenomenal wordplay by me). I'm working on a post jam version and am thinking about something like word specials.
For example, at some random point in the game, a word falls out of the sky letter by letter. If you are able to type the letters out as they fall and before they hit the ground, you get some buff or something. It would also make sense for these words to be thesaurus-ised (to make them verbose).
Maybe one of these could be the word acceleration, which when successfully typed gives your units a speed buff.
I don't know yet though, I haven't tried it out and don't know how it feels yet. It might be a bit tedious, but I wanna give it a try!
That was a good game! Unfortunately I got stuck on a level but what I played was fun. The premise was a hilarious take on the theme and I think you all did well with it. I liked the art, simple animations and sound effects. A small thing is that I would've liked to see things in more precise numbers such as how much health the reinforce building upgrade gave and how much damage each unit did. I'd like to see a post-jam version with updated balancing and content! Great job!
@mhykah by stuck on a level do you mean the one with the barrage of ghostwriters? If so, that was supposed to be the end of the game, but we weren't ready with it, so I just used an impossible (technically possible, but you'd need to spend time leveling up your bp/s to at least 76 to pass it) level as an array overflow guard.
yes, I know, amazing design! (...)
About the animations, we were originally supposed to have a walk cycle, but my artist (amazing artist), had never worked with pixel art before so he had trouble making them. I told him to leave it and introduced....... PROGRAMMER WALK CYCLES!
I agree with you on the point of making information available to the player. I think it's essential. One of my favourite games, [heat signature](, is all about having all the information available to you: How the AI will react to this, or how many guards there will be, or what weapons they will have. I would have loved to make this change, but in all honesty, I kinda forgot about it. oops.
As for the last point, a post jam version is coming soon! Thanks for playing and giving feedback!
good and creative concept for the theme.. graphics are pretty good, it's cute tho 😄 i invest on upgrading activist & journalist until max stats (because it's cheap), it works for the 4th time until.. enemy spam this dudes ghostwriters 😑 well.. ok you win.. anyway, good job on making this 👍
Fun game, very broken though haha. I do wish there was a bit more "juice" to the game (screenshake, clicky buttons, hit effects, etc.). Overall great job for a jam game!
@brendev I agree. I wanted to add particles, sounds, screenshake to make everything feel more impactful and to further the game feel but sadly, it didn't pan out due to time constraints.
As for the broken-ness, I am working on it with a post jam patch!
Easily the most creative take on the theme I've seen. Unfortunately it's quite a lot to take in. It probably would have been good to focus on a simpler set of systems and polish them. (I should know, I've made several indecipherable jam games)
@santriptasharma Trying to figure out how each part of the game feeds into the strategy. Though reading that it's unbalanced, it makes it less engaging to try to figure out. Having most of the game be in the "strategy" tab was also kind of confusing. Considering declaring war is the main thing you do in the game you would imagine it would be the central button on the title screen but instead it's in a side tab to the right. At first I figured the strategy tab was just a "how to" page and the actual game controls were somewhere else. I guess playing it again I'm starting to understand how it all works, but at least initially all the systems are daunting making it tempting to just not figure it out and move on to another game.
@scott-steffes Ah, I see what you mean. That's a good point. I suppose that stuff that is obvious to you as the creator isn't necessarily as obvious to everyone else. Thanks! I'll keep that in mind.
Great game ! Litteral theme interpretation never get old with me haha
Feel nice to play, has a funny story and there are a lot of interesting powerups. As you said, it's quite unbalanced, but I'm sure that with more time it would have been fixed.
well done its really good
wish u the best