NOTE: ORBIDRONE is best played in full screen mode
In a distant galaxy, a small moon - originally meant for mining and asteroid defense - now turned into the last stronghold for humanity in the OMM-23T sector.
What started as a small group of self-replicating and self-enhancing help-and-defend drones turned into a large, violent, planet-engulfing swarm all because one developer decided that skipping a few test cases would be fine if it meant he had a bit more time to work and that "sweet other feature"...
Unfortunately, those test cases were supposed to ensure that the "helper" bots adhere to the 3 laws of robotics. Now, they see us as trash that needs to be removed.
Life has turned into a frantic Prepare-and-fight cycle as the moon plummets once more towards the swarm of drones surrounding the once peaceful planet.
That Red Zone will be the end of us all....
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ORBIDRONE is a survival, resource management, tower-defense game set in the future in a galaxy far, far away. Build and maintain your base. Recharge, repair, recondition or recycle your base parts, and prepare for the red zone because those drones are relentless, and your guns are probably not that good.
Keep the shield up because once your habitat is destroyed, it's tickets...
Info
Manage your resources while protecting your habitat, because once it's gone, it's gone.
Buy weapons, generators, batteries and resource storage at the shop. Recharge, Repair, Recondition and Recycle your base parts from the maintenance menu.
Zoom with the mouse wheel, and rotate around your base using the right mouse button.
Interesting concept, though the text was way too small in the instructions screen and I didn't really get a good idea of what to do so I kept dying multiple times. I enjoyed the music!
Thank you for the feedback, @spiderpeace & @sarenei. Sadly, we ran out of time and couldn't add some of the polish we wanted to. Art and music was done by @anrqangel.
I got a bit confused when my towers suddenly stopped shooting but once I figured out I needed to refill them I got to blasting drones out of the sky again. Cool take, the music is great and it looks really good, well done!
Cool concept. Definitely could have benefited from some light tutorialization. I didn't realize that after you buy a gun you have to click on one of the hex tiles for the longest time till I accidentally clicked.
Thanks @bongard22 and @malle, yes a small "How To place and recharge things" was planned, but time caught up with as a bit too quickly and some planned features had to be stashed. Thanks for playing and commenting!
@thegreenworm haha yes, we learned in this jam that we really need to increase our UI and time management skills! Thanks for the feedback.
@the-missing-bracket currently resources are gained passively as asteroids impact the moon. You will notice a quick bright flash and sometimes spot the shadow streaking over the surface of the moon. When this happens, some resources will be gained.
Same as @sepee67 I was kinda confused how to get the shields back up. Other than that, this is a great little tower defense game, especially when considering that you only had 72 for everything.
@chris-fagan and @xenobey Thanks! It definitely was challenging and we wish time didn't creep up and bite us like it did so that we could have avoided some of the confusion with some polishing.
But we worked hard and I'm glad people like it! Thanks for playing and commenting.
I think there's a solid gameplay idea here, but as mentioned before, a tutorial and a bit better GUI would go a long way into understanding what the player is supposed to do here.
Really wonderful concept! That the icons and resource numbers didn't update in the maintinance menu did cause me a moment of confusion but considering the limited time I understand that there probably wasn't enough time to fix that. :)
I'm really sorry, I tried my best to undertand the mechanics of the game. But I kept getting insta-killed in less than a minute a couple of times. I bought a bunch of turrets, I had energy and resource de refill them, and my shield was still at almost 100%, and I still died as soon as enemies showed up.
Sorry to hear @cydouzo. There are some issues with balancing and resources. We are fixing those and will post a patch a little later, but we have to get rated on what we submitted. Thanks for trying, though.
There's a lot of potential depth in this game which unfortunately is hidden behind a complicated UI which makes the game quite frustrating to play.
I would have liked to see something like a contextual menu pop up when you click one of the machines where you can reload/repair/upgrade/recycle it instead of having to go through a UI and find it in a list.
I liked that all the machines have different models when upgraded, that's a nice touch!
I had some problems with menu and UI. I couldn't find how to upgrade objects until it was too late. The difficulty curve is too steep due to that (I thought first wave can be held off with single cannon. Clearly that wasn't the case. I haven't found out the way how to recharge shield, so few of my playthroughs were quite short.
Overall I enjoyed the entry, keep up the good work!
Thank you @jaoel. We intended to have a contextual menu but as we mentioned before, time caught up to us. I have already started revamping the UI and it does, in fact, have a contextual menu. Here's an early prototype
Thank you for playing our game, @azagaya and @ben-ash. Glad you enjoyed it!
@zgragselus, we are currently balancing the difficulty. Thank you for playing, though.
@usenrame Thank you. It may just become a full project. We really enjoyed making this game and are currently in the process of cleaning everything up. We may even be posting an updated version here. And there are so many ideas we had that ended up on the cutting floor
A little confusing, and the text was definitely real small as others have mentioned, but it was still workable in fullscreen mode. Good effort - it's not easy working on such a tight deadline!
Hi @iodi, thanks! With the current balancing and features it's impossible to "win" in the traditional sense. It's more of a "see how far you get" type of ordeal at the moment. As the moon completes another orbit, the drone swarm grows larger and more drones will come to try and destroy the human stronghold.
@graebor Yes time definitely bit us quite hard as the end drew closer, but now we have all the time to add all the features and UI improvements that we want. There will definitely be an updated version of this sometime in the near future and we learned quite a bit from this LD47.
Well is a nice idea, however it kinda got ruined by the fact that i can't recharge my cannons, the ui just got stuck on a store thingy and I died, so you should really work more on the ui because it makes the game unplayable.The graphics are ok and i actually like the tower defence style so with a bit of work it would make a quite nice experience.
I like atmosphere of this game. Somebody use more time to think about the game then others, it is visible in inovations!. Average fun game, but maybe next time you will polish the gameplay and it will be better. Not bad, not bad :) I like your art. Thememaster, thats you are, fit into the theme. Amazing audio, I like it, really. Overall that game is good, good job.
@csomega Yes, the UI is certainly not the best, but so one learns and we are determined to make it better. Thanks for the feedback!
@hadik Thank you! Yes, some polish would have made quite a difference in the experience if we had the time. But I think we learned quite a bit out of this. Thanks for playing and commenting!
Nice game! I died many times :pensive: I think it's a bit hard to understand how to survive longer.
One thing that seemed a little bit broken, though, was that reconditioning the lasers seemed to increase the resources, instead of costing resources. That sounds like it's unintentional?
This game got a nice idea but looks like the scope went too big for the limited time frame.
The UI and controls are confusing and/or not intuitive. The gameplay feels a little rushed as the player barely got time to prepare before the first wave and there's resource to build all buildings. What exactly each do? If this game will be pushed to full project in future (which totally should be) these are some points to take into consideration in my opinion.
On the bright side, nice graphics and 3d models. From the screenshots I knew it would be a beautiful game. Also, nice theme usage with the orbit thing.
Despite the problems, still an impressive accomplishment.
Idea great, not much intuitive tho'. Got lost in the controls and imho there's too much going on at a moment. While other time there's nothing going on and you end up just waiting.
That being said, this is a game that I would like to keep watching for further development.
Comments47
@thegreenworm haha yes, we learned in this jam that we really need to increase our UI and time management skills! Thanks for the feedback.
But we worked hard and I'm glad people like it! Thanks for playing and commenting.
I would have liked to see something like a contextual menu pop up when you click one of the machines where you can reload/repair/upgrade/recycle it instead of having to go through a UI and find it in a list.
I liked that all the machines have different models when upgraded, that's a nice touch!
I had some problems with menu and UI. I couldn't find how to upgrade objects until it was too late. The difficulty curve is too steep due to that (I thought first wave can be held off with single cannon. Clearly that wasn't the case. I haven't found out the way how to recharge shield, so few of my playthroughs were quite short.
Overall I enjoyed the entry, keep up the good work!
Thank you for playing our game, @azagaya and @ben-ash. Glad you enjoyed it!
@zgragselus, we are currently balancing the difficulty. Thank you for playing, though.
@usenrame Thank you. It may just become a full project. We really enjoyed making this game and are currently in the process of cleaning everything up. We may even be posting an updated version here. And there are so many ideas we had that ended up on the cutting floor
@eugenik Thank you!
@graebor Yes time definitely bit us quite hard as the end drew closer, but now we have all the time to add all the features and UI improvements that we want. There will definitely be an updated version of this sometime in the near future and we learned quite a bit from this LD47.
@hadik Thank you! Yes, some polish would have made quite a difference in the experience if we had the time. But I think we learned quite a bit out of this. Thanks for playing and commenting!
One thing that seemed a little bit broken, though, was that reconditioning the lasers seemed to increase the resources, instead of costing resources. That sounds like it's unintentional?
The UI and controls are confusing and/or not intuitive. The gameplay feels a little rushed as the player barely got time to prepare before the first wave and there's resource to build all buildings. What exactly each do?
If this game will be pushed to full project in future (which totally should be) these are some points to take into consideration in my opinion.
On the bright side, nice graphics and 3d models. From the screenshots I knew it would be a beautiful game. Also, nice theme usage with the orbit thing.
Despite the problems, still an impressive accomplishment.
That being said, this is a game that I would like to keep watching for further development.
If you are interested, keep an eye on the itch.io site for updates.
https://bixarrio.itch.io/orbidrone