Planet SMASH! Screenshot.

Planet SMASH!

Welcome to Planet SMASH!, an intergalactic reality show where Earth has to repel an alien invasion with a melee weapon. What melee weapon, you ask? A massive tower, of course!

(This one was really tight with time, and it lacks a number of features and balancing. It is beatable though. Hope you enjoy it!)

Awards

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Scores

Ratings (show detail)

Overall: 3.4
Fun: 2.7
Production: 3.9
Innovation: 3.4

5% respondents marked the game as not working.
Respondents: 16

Files

File Uploader Date
PlanetSmash-Win.zipfinal
Planet SMASH! Windows version.
Tee 2019/09/29 01:34
PlanetSmash-ss.png
Planet SMASH! Screenshot.
Tee 2019/09/29 00:37
PlanetSmash.zipfinal
Planet SMASH! Final entry.
Tee 2019/09/29 00:15

Diary Entries

Planet SMASH!: Postmortem

Thanks for the feedback!

I usually try to make my games as minimal as possible so I can actually finish them, but I fell into my old ways of being too ambitious (well, given the available time and my efficiency).

While I had fun in the middle of the week drawing the alien, I didn't have time to implement much of the actual gameplay. Originally this was supposed to be called Planet JOUST!, and it would involve two planets fighting each other with gigantic towers as swords. I downgraded it to Planet SMASH! at an attempt to salvage some gameplay, and changed the other planet to little ships (which were actually still placeholder art) to make it easier to implement.

Making a strategy game requires a lot of interface details, feedback to the player, etc., and I only had time to add the bare essentials. It's awkward to play this game without a decent interface and, rightfully so, many of you mentioned that. But I hope even with the bad interface, the game at least gave a taste of what I was aiming for.

I was hoping to have the tower itself be a more interesting component of the game. It would break as you hit the enemy, and certain floors would be more resistant than others according to your upgrades. So the top floors would be more fragile than the bottom floors. The damage would be computed based on the actual part of the tower that was part of the impact, rather than a global damage, and some floors would be "offensive" floors in that they would add more damage if it hits the target, and you would want them at the top. I was also planning abilities to alter the orbit and repair floors.

This would probably be best implemented with a pause system like FTL so the player can think about what to do, and consider their orbit to see how they can hit the other planet on the next pass. Due to time I ended up making it a bit more action-y than strategy in an attempt to make the gameplay more interesting, but I'm not sure if that was the right move. I wonder if I should have gone the opposite way, kept the single enemy, and made it turn-based for each pass. In any case, all of this was too ambitious for the time I had available. Not to mention this is probably terribly unbalanced because I only tried to balance it in the last 15 minutes. To be fair, I'm not sure I would be able to get the gameplay right even if I had more time, because the concept needs a lot of playtesting and fine-tuning.

Even if this was too ambitious, I did have fun implementing this. I think it's a cool little concept and I'm glad I tried to implement it.

These past few weeks were busy for me and unfortunately I couldn't rate your games this time. Hopefully next time I'll be able to, sorry about that. :/

Congratulations to the winners, and I'll see you next time!

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