The Bridge has been formed and the foe advances!
Manage your crew, and keep the cannons firing to hold them back until the infernal connection can be destroyed!
Controls
- X/(X): switch currently selected crew member
- Dpad: select a location in range to move current crew to
- Z/(O): move current crew to selected location (or view crew info)
- Mouse controls can be enabled
Rules
- The enemy advances with every second action you take
- Put crew members behind the cannons to keep firing them
- Collect ammo when (or before) your crew runs out
- Collect stars to promote your crew and give them special blast patterns and other abilities
- Hold out, and don't let the enemy breach the cannon line until The Bridge can be totally destroyed!
About
This is my first foray into Pico8 dev, and it has been a blast to work on. I had stalled out on a side project I was making in Godot and decided to try doing this little "demake" of it instead. The result was a much more focused and elegant design thanks to the limitations of Pico8. So I think might keep expanding on this little prototype here and see where I can take it.
I'm also still trying to tune the difficulty, so let me know if you found it challenging or frustrating (or any combination there of).
UPDATE:
- Fix (12/04/2025): game can now actually be played with "mouse enabled" instead of crashing. A reminder to myself that I should really make sure I test with mouse before uploading
The first time I lost because I wasted too many shots, the next time I reduced the number of wasted shots and won.
I love TowerDefence and I love this Game.
Best battle so far is losing 5 rounds before end, because I made one wrong move with one crew member or a move with the wrong crew member.
I have problems with the game pace or my memory what crew member I selected last, when planing the next move in my head, that leads to hasty button press or fatal crew placement.
An indicator or maybe gray unselected crew members could help me, but would ruin the great game color design.
I hope I win some day 😅.
@tmskna - Thanks so much for playing! That 3x Split Blast and Double Damage on Green you had looks like it would have been tearing up large chunks of the Bridge!😀
@Zellente - Really glad you like it! And thanks for that feedback, I've definitely experienced a similar issue to what you described. If end up iterating on this some more I might see if I can leave a subtle indicator on while cannons are firing and the enemy is moving so the player doesn't lose track of the last selected crew member.
This is such a cool little tactics puzzle, it feels really unique!
Overall very good. The aesthetic evokes a strange old computer : every graphic is 8x8 1bit monochrome+transparent, but is seems you have 3 superposed layers, with potential shifting of one of the graphic pages (the monster layer or the bullet layer), except for the little area at the bottom that seem to be bitmap. What finished to convey the constraints are the cannons, with some grey and some black visible through.
Of course, you have full liberty to set any pixel to any of the 16 colors of the chosen palette, in pico-8, but the chosen constraints evokes a kind of strange 80s console, with graphic constraints somewhere between ZX spectrum and C64.
I'm curious, was it a happy accident due to not being familiar with pico-8 pal() and palt() way of handling sprites, or were you having a particular idea of the graphics style you were after ?
About the game interface :
it's easy to make mistakes when moving. If blue and green are adjacent and the current selected one can move on all the squares the other can go to, it's easy to move the wrong character. This could be solved by having the selected character be highlighted (or blink, to keep in line with the art style), for example.
A lot of the game is bullet management, and one of the sources of bullets is stars. Unfortunately, the level up window covers the bullet counters.
It's also not convenient to check the max ammo of the characters. I can see it would break the symmetry of the GUI to add the max ammo info to the main screen, but I'd still like to have the option, maybe as a parameter in the pause menu, for example.
About the upgrades, it really feels like the luck of the draw. The few times I won the game, I had at least one very powerful unit, like damage+pierce+ghost for example. It's bittersweet to only be able to win when being dealt very strong cards, for a strategy game. Maybe add the possibility to leave a star on the floor for someone else if it is not the best for the current character ? Not sure if the idea is good as it would allow to min/max the builds...
Ammo sharer is often more a curse than a blessing. High hitters with low mobility can be moved around by high movers, but ammo sharer can stop you from using that strategy.
@RealShadowCaster Thanks for the feedback! A lot of useful stuff in there for me to consider
The odd art style kind of evolved out some initial placeholder art I had whipped up to get things up and running quickly. My pixel art skills are pretty limited, so I wasn't expecting to like the results as much as I did. In the end I mostly rolled with it with a few tweaks here and there 😅
"About the upgrades, it really feels like the luck of the draw." - Yeah, this was exactly the feedback I was after/expecting. One of the improvements I want to eventually make is to have the player choose one of 2-3 upgrades whenever they pick up a star. So some randomness, but the option to choose the "best" option from a limited selection (I also agree that Ammo Sharer is definitely a prime candidate for redesign or replacement).
Great job! ⭐ The game mechanic is brilliant. About difficulty: I might have been very lucky but I finished it on the very first attempt. Anyway challenging enough since they got really dangerously close 3 or 4 times.
The upgrades being too random: it could maybe help being able to select the star tile and know what upgrade is so we could decide which crew member could need it?
E.g. I got one member taking "Pierce blast" TWICE... I don't think having two improves it (does it?) so I could have preferred another member to get it.
Edit: oh wait the second same upgrade indeed improves it, or at least on this second game one member got Split blast twice and it splits the shot x2 at the sides 👌
@Heracleum , all the blast upgrades add two impacts to the unit's bullets.
Pierce is the best with two forward on the same lane. Two pierces on the same unit is actually very good, especially if the unit has some mobility.
The other blasts are V blast (diagonal forward), reverse blast (the worst, diagonal backwards) and split blast (horizontal). Double split is very good, even with no mobility : you can place the unit near the center and let it shoot while moving the other two. Even if you hit nothing directly, the new-comers on the 4 adjacent lines will get hit.
@RealShadowCaster yep I confirm Pierce x2 was evidently the key of my first lucky win (I tried two more games and I failed even knowing better the mechanic 🥲).
Oh one detail that looks weird (bug?) to me:
having the Ghost shot iirc -by the way the upgrade that lets you shot once in the prev location and again in the new spot- I've noticed that when you have 1 bullet left it shoots the first in prev spot and nothing in the new one. Is it intended? (I didn't notice does it consume two bullets per move?)
Edit: oh yes, ghost shot does in fact consume 2 bullets when moving, so it does make sense that the second shot doesn't go off when only 1 bullet is left 👍
@foolhardy
Just had a great run with a mid to bad team, and went from one planned close call to the other, doing maximum damage to the units in the back in the mean time. Finally got overwhelmed everywhere at once a few clock ticks from victory, and really wanted to replay.
The following run was easy with two strong units out of three, and while fun, it wasn't the battle I wanted to replay, so here's a suggestion :
At start of the game, save the RNG seed and draw in advance all the abilities each player will get when leveling up. In the game over screen, offer a "retry same wave" option that would restart the game while re-poking the saved RNG seed, for a challenging rematch, where the player has foreknowledge of what the three units will become and what the waves will be.
@Scratchy157 - ah thanks for letting me know about that! I REALLY should have properly tested with "mouse enabled" before uploading. A quick fix should be in for that issue
@Heracleum - Glad you're enjoying the game! Previewing what skill the next star will be when you put the cursor over sounds pretty neat. I'm currently considering how I could add different difficulty levels. Possibly tying how much control the player has over their selecting their skill upgrades to the difficulty rating. So this could be a neat midway point between the current totally random skill upgrades and being able to select a specific skill from a list.
@RealShadowCaster - I had not even considered opening up the random seeds to players, but I really like that idea! I'd need to look into how I would do it some more, but I like the possibility of players sharing specific random seeds that they found challenging with each other.
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