Greedy gremlins

Made for Trijam #294 'Accululate power' in ~13 hours

All assets except the font made by myself.

Controls

Clicking/holding left mouse button over a player-owned building then dragging the cursor  and releasing over a target building to attack, reinforce and upgrade buildings. 

W/Up and S/Down keys to adjust the % of troops within a building to commit to a troop movement

In-game tutorial covers all aspects

Instructions

Your objective is to accumulate enough power (through numerical gremlin superiority) to take over all bases on the map.

Hover over your bases (green) to select them. Click, hold and then drag the left mouse button to prepare a sendout of gremlin troops. Hover the mouse over a friendy or enemy base and release the left mouse button to confirm sending the gremlin troops.

Use either W/S or the up/down keys to adjust the % of gremlin troops to send. The current sendout % will be displayed when preparing a sendout and can be adjusted in increments of 25%.

Click the left mouse button on upgrade boxes (when they are available) to spend that many gremlins within that building to begin the upgrade process.

There are 3 tiers of upgrade (Village, Fort, Castle) which produce additional gremlins faster with each increasing tier. Additionally, while all buildings can hold an unlimited number of gremlins, they will stop producing more gremlins once a building population threshold is reached - upgrading buildings will increase that threshold.

Development

As might be readily apparent to anyone who has played it, Greedy Gremlins is a clone of Mushroom Wars (2009). While I only ever owned the demo, the simple gameplay, colourful aesthetics and catchy music meant that I likely played a solid 20-30 hours of the demo overall.

There were two big issues for me developing Greedy Gremlins: Keeping accurate track of gremlins, and AI design.

For the first issue, there are so many edge cases where if one line of code runs lightly after another, too many or two few gremlins are counted, meaning that buildings start displaing negative numbers. If I were to deisgn a similar system, I would likely create some type of queue to handle these requests - but by the time I came to this realisation the jam was well underway and there was no turning back.

For the AI, I'd never created any sort of RTS style computer opponent. It was one of the final aspects of development that I tackled and I found myself having to create all sorts of new variables that I could allow it to track within the game for its decision making. While a lot of my intended functionality will sadly remain on the metaphorical cutting room floor, I was pleasantly surprised by just how challenging it can be! In particular, the last level features a version that makes decisions more often, leading to some long battles to overcome it!

Credits

ggBot (https://ggbot.itch.io/) - font 'Kaph'

JiminySnicket (Me) - All other aspects

• Music & SFX made in BeepBox
• Art made in Krita