Ludum Dare #55compo

Age of Research

by ping78

Overall★★★★★★★★★★3.37

Fun★★★★★★★★★★3.24

Innovation★★★★★★★★★★2.91

Theme★★★★★★★★★★2.98

Graphics★★★★★★★★★★3.83

Humor★★★★★★★★★★2.71

Mood★★★★★★★★★★2.91

Summoning demons lame, summoning lemons lime, summoning bots now that's exciting. Not as cool as summoning kittens mind you, but it's the next best thing. Forget all the magic users, their pesky tricks, their absurd drawings and their foolish hats. Take command of Planetary Research Apparatus, take part on the front lines of our research. EMBRACE technological superiority. Reign research itself from the SKY ...no, wait, not *sky* that's something a silly magic user would say. We CAN'T have that in our recruiting ad, change it to ORBIT or better yet SPACE

Summonable bots and abilities:
• Research Integrity Maintainment Unit - ensures efficient research environment
• High Energy Research Integrity Maintainment Unit - for when additional research integrity is required
• Assimilator - takes small material samples
• Orbital ~~Death Ray~~ Obstacle Remover - efficiently removes any kind of research obstacle
• Quad Speed Overclock - highly improves efficiency of summoned bots for a short time

Tags: #3d, #forest, #mashup, #mouse only, #real time strategy, #real-time, #sci-fi, #short, #singleplayer, #tower defense

Genres: strategy

Comments17

LDJam user 29849615 Apr 2024, 16:07

Neat looking game with a really nice movement effect on the main unit. Nice work!

Pincushion15 Apr 2024, 17:41

Solid game, but make it harder. Nice looking. The controls were really smooth too. The monsters were a little too easy to kill. The weapons were so quick and powerful that I didn't need to strategize too much. There were some nice abilities on the bar (the 4th had a nice visual effect), but I used the second one for all my defense needs. I couldn't figure out how to use the 5th.

DeerofBlue19 Apr 2024, 22:04

Soild! the controls are smooth, and it is impressive that you made a 3D game in just 48 hours. I like the visual effects very much. However, if the gameplay can be more challenging it will be more playable.

Hideyzzz19 Apr 2024, 22:17

It looks nice, I like the smooth movement of the main structure. But it probably wasn't complicated enough. It would be cool to see upgraded weapons, for example, and different levels of monsters. But these are more like wishes if you finalize the game after the game jam

binroot19 Apr 2024, 23:16

Lots of character and humor from the text alone! Cool art too!

Salanyel19 Apr 2024, 23:28

Pretty cool!

Nice visual, nice gameplay. The towers are cool and the visual neats.

Taximan98120 Apr 2024, 04:30

Pretty cool game which you can really lose track of time in.

LDJam user 37416820 Apr 2024, 04:51

Love the RTS game, it's really impressive you were able to make it in such a short time! I think the research angle was cool, needing to place those research beacons on the volcanos and protect them. I think the camera felt a little too zoomed in, and would've liked the ability to adjust the zoom level. It was also pretty easy, the game balance felt a bit too favored towards the player. Overall though, it was really enjoyable, I like this a lot!

Bytomancer20 Apr 2024, 17:02

Really interesting take on RTS and tower defense. I like the idea of units with short lifespans, really makes the economy of actions more important. Interface could have used a little work, it took me a while to figure out how to move the base. Overall, very impressive game for a compo!

henk20 Apr 2024, 17:54

This is great! I love the long, satisfying play time. The edge scrolling was a bit tricky
for me, so I found myself just holding down space and right-click to zip
around the place. I never used the smaller turrets, and didn't realize
how to use the (shield, I think?) until I was already seconds from winning.
Other than the lack of sound, this feels very complete.

Also: the source you posted seems to be missing most of the project
files and assets, so I'm not sure how I would compile and run this
locally. I may be misinterpreting the rules, but I thought it was
required to post all of the source files needed to get the game to
work, not just script files.

Choisicles21 Apr 2024, 21:09

I enjoyed this take on the 3D tower defense genre! There was a lot of polish here and it made the game much more impressive. I didn't know initially that I had to perform research at the volcanoes, so I spent my first couple minutes just defending home base wondering when I would see the victory screen. It might've just been my device, but the low frame rate when playing on web caused me to lose track of where I was in the forest at times. I really liked that the game was forgiving with health and energy regen as someone who isn't the best at tower defense games. Overall I think you did a good job!

LDJam user 36474421 Apr 2024, 21:12

extremely impressive entry, completing a whole 3d RTS in 48 hours! the controls were a little iffy for me, specificaly with edge scrolling + right clicking misbehaving on a browser.

the core gameplay loop works very well! it was a bit tricky for me since the creeps would clump up on a geyser and i instantly died when i tried to approach it, so overall a fun challenge!

jnw22 Apr 2024, 03:00

Really polished! Only improvement I can think of is adding mana cost numbers to the UI components of the player's abilities.

burnedkirby22 Apr 2024, 09:32

No bugs, great graphics, and the RTS-style-gameplay is not hard to grasp. It was unclear how to harvest the gas from the area until some trial-and-error. After a long while, managed to reach 100% research, which was satisfying but was also an abrupt end to the game. Good work!

kawa-yoiko23 Apr 2024, 07:36

The gameplay is quite polished and well balanced, being a traditional tower defense combined with a unique take on the research of exotic material samples (needs a unit to move around and deploy harvesting units). The functions of units were not apparent to me at first — it became clear when I revisited the description, but the description did not make sense before I started the game, so I suppose this could need a bit more polish. Other than that, the entire experience is pretty solid with the in-game introduction. The map is unexpectedly large, so maybe some easier navigation method could be helpful to the player.

The theme might not be explored to its full potential (the RTS genre already possesses this 'summoning' aspect), but this is already very complete and impressive as a Compo entry.

I also like how you use euphemism on the naming of units, sounds pretty like some sarcasm on civilisation's unlimited exploitation…

Cody Raethke27 Apr 2024, 03:09

It took me a bit to figure out how to move the main character and how to perform "research", but once I figured it out it was pretty fun. The enemy model/animation was pretty cool, very organic-looking, which is hard to accomplish. Overall, a really nice entry.

Flightless2 May 2024, 18:51

Impressive amount of features and quality of graphics for a compo! I was not able to complete the game due to science buildings draining their durability super-quick - the shield did not seem to protect from that.

Other games by @ping78

★3.42

★3.27

★3.24