August 23rd-26th 2013 :: Theme: 10 Seconds
Ludum Dare 27 — August 23rd-26th, 2013
[ Results: Top 100 Compo, Jam | Top 25 Categories | View My Entry ]
[ View All 2213 Games (Compo Only, Jam Only) | Warmup ]
IMPORTANT NOTE: If you want to place in the final results, you NEED votes. The easiest way to get votes is by rating other games. Judging lasts for 3 weeks following the end of Ludum Dare. For best effect, rate 20 games as soon as possible. Rating more games is encouraged.
MORE TIPS AND DETAILS AT THE BOTTOM OF THIS PAGE
Here's our entry for this Jam. It came out pretty polished in the end, and we're satisfied with the final game.
Placeholder is our take on a Tower Defense game that does things completely different. There is no 'maze', your buildings attack eachother, and managing your income has a very special mechanic. The difficulty is tuned to be somewhat easy at the beginning, but it gets pretty challenging overall.
=======================================================================
Make sure to read the description and rules posted below the game before playing. If you get stuck, strategy and hints can be found below.
=======================================================================
Downloads and Links
Ratings
 | Coolness | 73% |
| #80 | Innovation(Jam) | 3.55 |
| #118 | Overall(Jam) | 3.50 |
| #146 | Fun(Jam) | 3.29 |
| #369 | Graphics(Jam) | 2.95 |
| #379 | Theme(Jam) | 2.90 |
| #413 | Mood(Jam) | 2.56 |
| #464 | Humor(Jam) | 1.64 |
| #489 | Audio(Jam) | 1.67 |
Comments
I dig the concept. Maybe I am just not skilled enough, but it seems that it's really really difficult to survive very long. I bookmarked this to play it again later and to see if I just chose bad strategies :) Well done!
Tower Defense!! Apart from the troll, this is a very good game :-)
Game mecanism is interesting: Beacon / Burner / Harvester - in other word, attract your ennemies, kill them, consume them to get energy.
This isn't actually a classic Tower Defense, this one is very brain-bending on finding the best placement strategy.
At first I thought the game would be way to easy. But when more and more portals popped up it became very challenging. This is a very cool form of tower defense. Overall one of my favorites! Keep it up.
Great game, interesting approach to strategy - destroying your own building is a nice touch. Beacon is essential!!
An example of a great gameplay. Fresh game, graphics and audio needs some work but good job.
Nice and tricky game play
i love this game
Check out our Roguelike game
I like the idea very much, took some time before i could play it good, Fun!
I like it, pretty difficult, cool idea however not a very interesting use of the 10 seconds theme
Very interesting approach and nicelly performed. Is the bacon burning out, or maybe only one at the same time? Anyways this is a great strategy. I would like to try on a grid with pre-defined placements or some kind of "magnetic" radial connections (according to the distance).. and some sound as well:)
Hi-Score update - Round:19, Kills:289 (disregard my comment above about the bacon - i was trying to place one behind the minimap, which by the way can be optimized for better structure view (dif colors for buildings)
If anyone is interested in Hi-Scores:
I managed to get to round 74 with about 2500 kills
The game can be quite difficult, but once you figure out how to solve some of the problems, you can get pretty far.
It is very possible to get past round 75, but you have to start using some very tricky mechanics (beacon chaining) at around level 40, and plan your layout very well.
Impressive ! You invented a good strategy game. Perhaps a bit hard
The game is fun, but time consuming if you hold through many rounds. My strategy was to keep the portals low, which brought me to round 107 with 842 kills. The beacon chaining is very powerful, but around level 100 the things are so quick, that it becomes extremely hard to kill them before they reach the end of the chain. I think you can get a bit higher than 107, but expect that thereabouts it will really become impossible to hold your place any longer.
That's a really great take on round-based strategy gaming. Sounds would have made this even better (or, possibly, sound just didn't work on my machine). I'll be playing this for a while now :)
Too complicated for my little mind :) I know it's lazy, but I didn't feel like reading a whole lot.
Very good TD concept here :)
The interface is very frustrating though: the arrow keys don't work during resolution phases, and the right click scrolling gets stuck each time the mouse leaves the game area.
This game was really interesting and I think you took tower defense games in an interesting way. I've never seen anything like this before. *Cyber-five* for also making a tower defense game :D
@kebabskal
We realise the game guide is a little long at the moment. A skippable in-game tutorial would probably work, but we didn't have time to implement something like that.
@deepnight
We haven't had any problems with arrow keys failing, what platform/browser are you on?
This game is taking a lot longer than I thought it would to get through so I'll post my thoughts now and some when I die. Currently at round 27 (234 kills) and finding that I basically have infinite energy at this point and am not seeing a point where I can die in sight. My first couple of attempts I got pretty owned until I figured out how to make the most use out of my initial resources and the first couple of rounds. Really enjoying so far, will comment and rate after I finish :)
Round 40 (305 kills), enemies getting noticeably faster now and starting to kill off my beacons pretty quickly. Still have a lot of energy (1236) but can see that I will die eventually.
Round 60 (428 kills, 740 energy). Things are really easily killing off beacons now. Managed to learn a strategy to make them bounce a little bit between beacons but can't figure which ones they will target now, seems a little random and so beacons are becoming less and less effective.
Round 66 (476 kills, 494 energy) Things are overwhelming my defences, taking out large chunks of my infrastructure quickly and without effort. Given up hope of beating teamenschede's score. I'm not going to make it out alive. Tell my wife I love her!
Round 69 (516 kills, 8 energy) Spent all my energy rashly in a last ditch effort to try and kill portals. Things could not be held back. I am dead. GG
Sorry for all the spam posting! Final thoughts: Fantasticly fun game, great idea and feels nicely tuned. At first I thought the game was going to be way too easy (after the initial learning curve) but it really escalated and provided a nice challenge all the way through. That said, I feel it could have progressed a little faster. Only issue I felt was that I couldn't be sure which beacon things would go to if I had a few overlapping and thus couldn't really plan out properly. Amazing game though, most fun one I have played this LD yet. Very nice work.
Bravo! The 10-second waves give a nice pause between planning, hot dog does it get hard quickly. Can't pas level 17 but I very much enjoy placing this :]
You must sign in to comment.
TEAMS: Teams entering the Jam should pick a single representative to submit your game, or create a team specific account you can share. We currently do not support Team Voting, but sharing an account and together playing and rating games is acceptable.
NOT LOGGED IN?: If you get a message about not being logged in, even though you are, it’s because your web browser cached the non-logged in page. You can fix this by either refreshing your cache or clearing your cache. CTRL+F5 in many browsers. Chrome is a bit more work. Press F12 to enable Developer Mode, then you can right click on the refresh button and select “Empty Cache and Hard Reload”. This option is unavailable if you are not in Developer Mode.
PORTS: Ports to other platforms can be done after the deadline. That said, the sooner you finish your port, the sooner people can play your game, improving your chances of placing in the final results. For best results, provide a Web version of your game, or a Windows version with no dependencies. Also be sure to rate about 20 games to improve your visibility.
MY GAME DOESN’T SHOW UP: If you can’t find your game, it’s usually because the URL to your downloads are missing ‘http://‘. Fix your URLs (http://mysite.com/mygame.zip) and you will show up.
MY GAME CRASHES, IS UNBEATABLE, OR I MADE A TYPO: We allow you to fix crash or win condition bugs after the deadline (in a sense, like “porting” to support more players). We also allow “typo” bugs. I.e. A true that should have been a false, a word that should have been a different word, very tiny changes that you would have caught if you had more sleep. We leave this open to interpretation, but generally speaking your game should be identical to the game you submitted. No new features, just things you messed up last minute. Typos.
I like this idea, felt like I was playing tower defence with marbles :D very unique idea from what I've seen so far, good job.