itch.io

i've just played another round, this time paying extra attention to tower spawns and units.
here is how it went:

first off, my previous comment on tower-spawn logic seems to be wrong. after the first unit is send, there seem to spawn a couple of towers quite rapidly, to around eight towers.

then there was a short break in spawns, followed by a slightly slower spawning of a few more tower.

then i saw another short break. by that time i could already send tanks and doing so seems to have triggered another slow spawning of a group of towers.

after that the towers seemed to spawn in irregular small groups but with a tendency to get slower over time.

i can't figure out the exact spawn logic with just this, but it at least seems to be unrelated to unit sending.
is it related money/income or just timer based with extra modifiers?

and now for the unit and tower performance:

basic units are just garbage. just two light-blue towers and stop any basic unit from getting through and that is guaranteed to be the case before the first wave has even ended. well, basic units are only meant bridge the gap to fast units so that is fine for now. a minor health increase would be nice though.

fast units are blazing through the map but are so very squishy that they hardly ever get to the second half of the map before dying. only the first three fast groups i send got even close to the end. this makes them also garbage, since they never actually scored any lives at all. here i suggest to increase their health by 1.5-2 times.
a drastic change i know, but i don't think anything below that would make them actually reach the end. at least not once 12+ towers are on the field, and that happens fast.

as for the high HP units, they were just as unstoppable as always. exactly two died before the unending caravan made it to the end and the others were at 80+% health still. this only changed near the end when enough towers were on the field get a few kills in. by then the average health dropped to 10-25%.
since they are the current game-ender units that is good enough. but once you have more unit types, they need to be adjusted. and if the game lasts only a few minutes longer and more towers spawn, the game becomes pretty much unwinnable.

as for the towers, the light blue towers shoot fast enough that two are enough to deny all basic units. and there are bound to be at least two in the initial rapid spawn of eight towers.
as for the other towers, i didn't really notice any kind standing out much. they all seem to shoot at similar power and speed. well, the yellow towers seem to be the slowest and strongest but not by much.
once the fast units are reliably shoot sown, the individual performance doesn't really matter anymore. and once the tanks are send the game is pretty much over.

i know i repeat myself, but you really need to add more units!
and maybe make the towers more distinct, like a noticeable slow/stun effect to the dark blue towers, a splash effect to red towers, etc...

last but not least, i found a bad bug.
after ending a match, it is not possible to play another round without re-loading the game.

when i try start a second match, no towers spawn, no units spawn and the income doesn't tick up.

i think the timer that runs in the background doesn't get reset right.

i'm happy you like my review! i try to give constructive critic and suggestion that are as unbiased as possible so i am happy to actually be of help~

to 1.   i was wondering why you wrote per 2,5 sec when it says per 5 sec, so that was the reason. though is didn't really notice i was getting the money at a faster tick-rate.

to 2.   queued sending is a nice idea! currently the game is just *click*-wait...*click*wait...* but the queuing can help appreciate the actual happenings more. though that also means there is even less to do.
i suggest adding something active to do while waiting for money to pile up.

as for the tower spawn... it felt a little slower, maybe? haven't played the jam version for direct comparison but it felt noticeably slower.

...oh! i think i know why. is the tower spawn bound to the number of units send? as in, it triggers the logic once per unit send button press?
if that is the case then the spawnrate is bound to be much lower, since i am no longer spam-clicking units !
if i'm right, you may want to adjust the tower spawn-rate and spawn-quality higher when sending stronger units. though i suggest adding more unit types to send first. 

at the moment the basic units are cheap, weak and usually never get to the end after a few waves, but that is fine.

the fast units are able to get to the end for a while, but around halfway to saving up for the tanks, none can reach the exit at all.

the tanks on the other hand can't rally be stopped at all. my strategy of sending a caravan of tanks allows all but the first one or two to reach the exit with maybe 80% health left. they are meant to be game-enders, so that is fine, but i can send them after just a few minutes of playing and by then there are downsides to sending as you don't need income of you are guaranteed to win anyways.

here again i suggest adding more units to give the game some strategic depth.
and maybe an upgrade system for units and an automatic upgrade logic for towers?

so i have returned to see how things have changed.

1. you solved the negative income issue by setting a minimum limit. i'm not happy with the 0.25 as i like clean numbers, but that is just me.

though the decision to still allow sending high HP units when the income is already at rock-bottom is a bit weird, but also not really an actual issue/problem.

2. you did stop the spam-clicking strategy by sending waves with a cooldown instead of the single unit spawning. i approve of this decision!

so the new sure win strategy is now to save up around 8000 money and then just keep patiently sending those high HP units until  the end. it took me maybe 10 min to win...

3. the tower designs... yeah you changed them. still not much to look at but a clear improvement nonetheless.

4. lack of content. well, that point remains the same. there seem to be more towers now, i think, but the overall content of things to do remains the same.

so, overall you made some minor adjustments and changes. it does feel a bit better to play. i hope you continue development!

things i think would be nice to add:

-more different units
-more maps and additional difficulty settings
-special abilities like 'tower-stun-zone' or 'unit-boosting-traps' (placed on the path) or units with special traits like healing over time, etc.

i'm sure you can think of even more yourself.

it's surprisingly hard to keep the civilization growth under control.

though as long as you can limited to one half of the map, stalling for good cards is pretty easy. got a win in 120 turns.

it is a fun little game!

i do have some small complains though. it is not possible to deselect a card after you select one, which means ones you clicked a card, you can't use the exclamation marks anymore, since the card click takes priority.

also, the card selection is a bit weird. i always got too many destroy 1X? cards and 1X1 cards, which are pretty useless in most situations since they can only partially delay the expansion by a turn or two without making a real dent in their numbers. you may want to look at the card selection algorithm a bit more.

on another note, i found it strange that the exclamation marks work the opposite of how the cards of the same color work.

not bad! i like the idea behind this game.

kinda reminds me of that old anti tower defense flash game i played years ago.

the current version has a few minor issues though.

first, your income can get into the negatives and if you spam click the high hp units too much and you can get stuck with no income, basically a gameover situation. i suggest setting a lower limit of 1 income per 5sec and a buy limitation for those units if the income would fall below that limit.

second, currently the only way to beat the game is spam-clicking those high hp units and earnestly, my hands hurt after clicking a few hundred times as fast as possible... so i suggest adding a wave send function where you send a certain number of units over a certain interval. maybe add upgrades to shorten said interval and add a formation/composition setting, along with stat upgrades.

third, general lack of content. for the formation setting to be useful, there need to be more unit types. i get that 48 hours is little time to flesh out the game, but now that its past the contest, please continue working on it!

fourth, is pretty much an extension of third. the visuals. i don't mind minimalistic graphics, but i still want at least SOMETHING to look at. just colored squares and circles just don't cut it.

with all that being said, you have already finished the hardest parts of game development, so keep up the good work!

the content is a little sparse...

just one tower with no further upgrade options and so few waves in total is quite little. but it is only version 0.21 so that will hopefully change.

everything you got so far seems to be working smoothly, it's a good base for the rest of the game. i'll come back to it in a while.

i like the added special abilities and items.  makes the game a lot complexer strategiewise and makes me want to take extra risks.

the new enemie types are appreciated as well.

keep up the good work!

...oh, and i had actually found another minor issue in the previous version i had forgotten to mention.  my minions seemed to get confused which item to take when multiple items stacked on the same field. 

if there were lets say five coins and a key as the third item, they would grab the coins that were first in line but not switch to the key.

i like your game quite a lot!

it's simple yet fun.

i do have some minor issues though...

first, there is some lag, especially in later levels with more units. looks to me like the game stops a few frames whenever a unit gets hit, which happens a lot. while i do use a pretty low-end machine, lagging on this kind of game should not happen.

second, there seems to be some minor input delay during snake movement. i already figured out that the snake seems to only accepts inputs the frame it completes the moving to a new square and that seems to be the mayority of the issue. i think a change from checking only on that frame to queueing up an input or maybe even two inputs would make moving the snake feel a lot better.

third, sorting units gets kinda difficult once you hit multiple rows. the menu sometimes collapses whenever i move over the border of a unit portrait. i think they don't quite line up borderless.

...could also be a fullscreen issue. if you press alt+enter in this kind of gamemaker programm, you can make the window fullscreen even if that is not actually intended. i use that a lot and some games show some strange issues only in this forced fullscreen mode, so i thought that may also apply here.

forth, the difficulty scales a bit too steep in the late levels. i mean, i didn't even get that golem to beyond halfway to the exit on the most direct path in 1-3.

i think an upgrade system and maybe the ability to sell units would improve the game quite a bit.

i don't mind if you restrict that to only between floor transitions, but it definitely should be added.

so, with that wall of text out of the way, i say it again, i like your game quite a lot and those issues are only minor.

in its current state the game Flipside Kingdom is already a lot of fun!

and i'm looking forward to how this game will devellop!

i have a few little suggestion what i would like to see added/changed.

first the most obvious things:  this game needs a main menu and more importantly an options menu. as much as i like the sounds and music, i want to be able to turn them off.

second, please add more new tiles with higher prizes. in my last game i earned about 400 gold per turn and had saved up over 3000 gold, i had nothing noteworthy to spend it on...
also, the towers are too rare to get. that last run had no towers till day four and only a total of maybe 15 towers in the whole game of over 25 days.

i hope you also add some kind of upgrade system, at least for the more important tiles. more interesting synagies would also be very much apprecieted. something like a triangle of towers turning into a big tower with extra range and powers.
another idea is the ability to change already placed tiles. maybe for a hefty prize of 1000 gold or a hard limit per match.

and last but not least, bugs. i encountered three so far: some of the monsters don't start moving from their tile and just disappear instead.not sure if the disappearence is your solution to the not-moving issue but it happened enough times to be worthy of commenting about. second, the mountains didn't spawn any monsters when flipped. and third, at some point the tiles behaved weirdly when holding/dragging them with the mouse around the map. instead of just moving and turning only slightly, they freak out and turn wildly in random directions. once one started, all subsequently dragged tiles also freaked out. luckily, placing them in the hand or on the map stopped the odd behavior, of that specific piece at least.
and while this is not really a bug, i noticed that the income calculation slows down noticeably the longer it needs to calculate, in other words, the more fields and stuff it has to go through, the slower it gets at starting the animation for the next tile.

and now with that wall of text out of the way, only one thing left to say:

keep up the good work! this game is awesome!