Paper Russula
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Protect your mushrooms!
Your forest is invaded by insects and other creatures, that will try and eat your mushrooms! Good news is that your mushroom can fight back, and empower each other to get rid of your enemies!
An endless puzzle game where you must think well when placing your defenses: all the mushrooms must be powered by special blocks, but they can be powered multiple times for extra power!
PaperRussula is an endless tower-defense puzzle game. Your goal is to place mushrooms to deal with incoming enemies, and last as long as possible. When an enemy reaches the bottom row of the screen, the game ends and your score is based on killed enemies.
Your building zone is a rectangular grid, scanned up to down by an energy beam. Each turn, one row is scanned then you must place a new tile, on any cell (empty or not).
When a row is scanned, each Activator is powered:
* Enemy Activators, looking like red skulls, allow all enemies to move and new enemies to spawn.
* Mushroom Activators, flat and blue with wires, activate all tiles to the direction they point. They also power other activators, try to make chain reactions! Be careful not to power Enemy Activators or you might regret it...
Some other tiles must be powered to work: Switch-Shrooms, Trap-Shrooms, and of course Attack Russulae, your main attack mushroom. Everything is described in convenient descriptions in the game.
Last, the Circle of Power-Shrooms increases attack of all attacking tiles (Russulae and Trap-Shrooms), without being powered.
Remember: do not forget to power your mushrooms with activators, and make combos for devastating power!
* Gameplay mechanics
* Graphics
* All musics and sounds
* Shaders
Exceptions :
* Fonts
* Our logo splashscreen (Taboulé Recipe)
* Pixel art: GraphicsGale & Krita
* Music: FL Studio
* Fix multiple tile description display bugs
* Fix multiple animation bugs
* Fix "ghost" double-activators, that remained active after being destroyed
Protect your mushrooms!
Your forest is invaded by insects and other creatures, that will try and eat your mushrooms! Good news is that your mushroom can fight back, and empower each other to get rid of your enemies!
An endless puzzle game where you must think well when placing your defenses: all the mushrooms must be powered by special blocks, but they can be powered multiple times for extra power!
How to play
PaperRussula is an endless tower-defense puzzle game. Your goal is to place mushrooms to deal with incoming enemies, and last as long as possible. When an enemy reaches the bottom row of the screen, the game ends and your score is based on killed enemies.
Your building zone is a rectangular grid, scanned up to down by an energy beam. Each turn, one row is scanned then you must place a new tile, on any cell (empty or not).
When a row is scanned, each Activator is powered:
* Enemy Activators, looking like red skulls, allow all enemies to move and new enemies to spawn.
* Mushroom Activators, flat and blue with wires, activate all tiles to the direction they point. They also power other activators, try to make chain reactions! Be careful not to power Enemy Activators or you might regret it...
Some other tiles must be powered to work: Switch-Shrooms, Trap-Shrooms, and of course Attack Russulae, your main attack mushroom. Everything is described in convenient descriptions in the game.
Last, the Circle of Power-Shrooms increases attack of all attacking tiles (Russulae and Trap-Shrooms), without being powered.
Remember: do not forget to power your mushrooms with activators, and make combos for devastating power!
Assets
Everything in this game has been made in the course of Ludum Dare 56, including:* Gameplay mechanics
* Graphics
* All musics and sounds
* Shaders
Exceptions :
* Fonts
* Our logo splashscreen (Taboulé Recipe)
Tools
* Game engine: Unity* Pixel art: GraphicsGale & Krita
* Music: FL Studio
Changelog
v1.0
Original game release during the Ludum Dare.v1.1
* Improvements & fixes made during the Ludum Dare.v1.2
* Fix .exe (could not launch on most PC)v1.3
* Add incremental RNG to prevent games without essential tiles* Fix multiple tile description display bugs
* Fix multiple animation bugs
* Fix "ghost" double-activators, that remained active after being destroyed
v1.4
* Add online scoring to compare your score with other players'!Genres: puzzle
Comments20
Thanks a lot for letting us know! Mistakes were made but are now fixed, the .exe version should work properly now! Don't hesitate to tell us if the errors persists!
I didn't find any bugs, I can say a few words about the balance:
1. Try using INCREMENTAL RND. (For example, when I didn't get a tile with electricity, I would like to be more likely to get it next time).
2. The game has a point of no return - when the enemy crawls to the field, it becomes too difficult to control, because initially the strategy is based on a good attack, not defense) Perhaps this can be corrected by increasing the field, largely because enemy tiles interfere too much in certain situations.
3. The visual and the soundtrack are excellent. I really liked this game. I would like to see more mechanics in it, and also to make enemy tiles more convenient for the player)
I think we'll make a little tweak update to balance a bit more the gameplay. :)
As some previous comments state, it needs to be a bit more balanced. The larger field would be nice, so the trap shroom make more sense. Also at certain point you have all the field full, so maybe some button to skip placing more mushrooms would be nice.
It seems like the available space is very restricted by the random starting activators. My final run I got what appeared to be a very nice set -- with both of them in the bottom right corner -- although I was not quite able to make anything good out of it.
I'm not quite sure how to actually put together a winning build. It seems to me like you need to have Russulas shooting in each column at least twice per cycle, which should be possible with some careful planning, but it also requires a very activator-heavy set of draws and I'm not sure if it's possible to construct it in time. It also seems like the short range of the Russulas means you more or less need them on the top two rows so that the rest of your build doesn't get destroyed (i.e. any lower, and anything critical above them will be destroyed by enemies before they fire).
It seems there must be some way to do it, given the scores in the 70s or so on the scoreboard. :smile:
I do like the puzzle here. It seems like a very restrictive set of tools available, especially given how difficult it is to route energy--from what I can tell there is no way to route a bunch of energy to all columns at once, any activator chain can only activate up to half of the columns due to the way that the horizontal activators work plus the limited number of rows.
It also is fun working through those first few enemies and trying to get a build going. Trying to strategize how to incrementally build and how to attack the enemies that are already present is a nice little challenge. I'm just not sure how to get any runs past that initial point!
One note: The Switch-shroom's description is incorrect, the Left one says it redirects enemies rightward and vice versa, which was very confusing.
I really enjoyed the graphics and the music was really cool, the mechanic sounds fresh and innovative and was a treat to play, really cool!
Actually one of the 60-70 scores is from myself, and I agree that it needs a very good understanding of some patterns to get there. We may make a more balanced (and less punishing) version after the game jam to fix that, as we feel that apart from this the game has some potential that could be better exploited with some more towers and real endgame gameplay.
I hope you still had fun, thanks again for the feedback!
PS: we take note of the description bug you found, we will fix it!
Early game currently relies on rng (with getting good enemy activator placements and then not getting screwed over by the options it gives you to build). And then late game there's nothing to do currently once you finish building up your defense and need to just keep placing the same plants on themselves over and over while slowly waiting for things to progress.
Some things that could improve on that if you do post jam work is having things unlocked and put in the pool over time as the run progresses to give reasons for changing the defense and rigging the rng a bit at the start to guarantee certain parts that are needed to survive (especially after the first enemy spawns).
Music was nice and complimented the gameplay well (although was a bit repetitive but thats fine for being a jam game) and the art was nice with the little animations each plant did. One thing that could improve on that a bit it having a indicator for the plant youre building when hovering over a tile (e.g. showing it there semi transparent)
This was the defense I made (and that kept me alive from a score of somewhere between 5-10 forget where all the way up to where I died). Ended up dying due to the push plant on the right not being able to push due to having too much of a swarm of enemies and then the enemy getting close and destroying my attack russula. (probably could have survived a tiny bit longer if I replaced the useless activator on the right with something else)
First 100+ run
I wish some things were better explained with in-game feedback. Not all of the defenses seemed to fire each round, even when they were powered. The reason for that wasn't clear, and I felt like that hindered my experimentation.
Otherwise, all of the different types of tiles were neat and fun to play with to try build a solid defense. It was definitely a unique take on the tower defense style, which I like!
Art and music both really fit the vibe.
To be frank we could not beat 80, and we were seriously theorizing that 100 was impossible... And you beat that impossible score by 65! Just incredible, and I agree that going that far makes the music and the gameplay repetitive :smile: