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TransFuse

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Author Comments

Made for the Butterscotch ShenaniJam in 48 hours with the theme "[Ep74] Electric Leech."

UPDATE: Added tooltips because many people were confused by the controls.

Your ship is out of juice and you’re stranded in an alien solar system. You believe you are very lucky when you notice a power signature on one of the local planets and decide to land there… only to realize that the power was coming from a horde of hostile alien electric leeches! You have no choice but to harvest them for energy or else you will never be able to leave, but the only way to capture them is to lure them close and hope they don’t get too much of your blood!

TransFuse is a Tower Defense game where your goal is to balance how many leeches get through (instead of trying to keep all away). Every leech that reaches your spaceship will give you power but take a bit of your blood. Reach 500 power to leave the planet and win the game!

Controls:

Use mouse to place towers or aim cannon. Switch between placing turrets and using cannon with the left two buttons. Enable/disable all turrets with the right two buttons (useful for letting leeches through your defenses to gain power).

Keyboard Shortcuts:

P - Pause/unpause game.
M - Mute/unmute game.
B - Build turret mode.
F - Fire cannon mode.
A - Enable all turrets.
Z - Disable all turrets.

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Meh. Don't really feel like there's anything satisfying about it.

i really dont like beacause the only thing you have to do is build turrets and kill aliens

Good:
- At least unusual if not original and unique gaming mechanics with having to balance between killing enemies and letting some reach you to raise energy at cost of health.
- Cool alien world sci-fi setting, love things like that.
- Very balanced gameplay.

Bad: Nothing is really bad but somehow I feel the game's formula is limited and the gameplay exhausts itself before becoming great enough to get a higher score. Once you realize the winning strategy there is nothing more that the game can offer except some timing challenge in fallowing trough the right strategy.

The winning strategy:
- Realize there are two types of leeches. Crawling yellow leeches cannot bypass towers and must circumvent them and cause 8 damage and give 4 energy. They are a bad deal and must nearly always get killed because they take more then they give. The flying gray leeches will fly over turrets and cause 4 damage and give 8 energy. Getting hit by them is a good deal if you have enough health to survive that hit and a few more as as a precaution.
- Realize that your cannon takes time to rotate, so shooting at all directions is something that must be avoided with help of automatic cannons covering some directions for you.
- Surround yourself with towers from three sides. This will make the bad ground leeches to be able to attack you from one side only and waste a lot of time circumnavigating the enclosure. This will also destroy most flying leeches from the three directions, except the biggest crowds. You will be shooting yourself only at 90-180 degree at the opening side and deciding how many enemies to shoot and how many to let reach you from this side.
- The opening side must be from right or left side, because game screen is longer in that direction giving you more time to react. Up and down must be handled by turrets.
- Kill all crawlers making it trough opening, only let flyers hit you and only if you can survive that.
- Don't place turrets too close to you. They are most effective if they can use their full range. This is achieved by planning your three wall enclosure so that the turrets on your direct up/down/side have place of two empty turret grid positions between themselves and the ship. You can put your first three free turrets in this position to outline the future perimeter.
- It might not be necessary. but I like to double and triple the turret wall directly opposite the opening so that to make sure no large group of flyer passes directly at your back an you don't have to rotate your gun at 180 degrees against your main fire line ever.
- Always leave at least 10 energy for shooting, don't build turrets on your last energy.
- If there are few enemies on screen wait for them to align on single line before shooting them to save energy. If there is a huge wave aim at large groups.
- When you have enough health and only a few rare flyers are onscreen disable all turrets and let them hit you to raise energy, pick any crawlers among them with gun. As soon as a massive wave of enemies comes, activate all turrets and shoot aggressively, aim at packs of crawlers first. During massive waves don't bother calculating how many enemies yo can afford to let trough, better kill them all and start calculating hen only a few are remaining.
- Don't bother spending time disabling or enabling turrets individually, use activate/disactivate all buttons.
- Don't get relaxed or cocky.
- When you finally escape nuke them from the orbit. It's the only way to be sure.

I really enjoyed this! The flying vs crawling leeches was a really nice mechanic. Would have maybe been nice if the circumstances were inverted (with flying leeches taking more health and giving less power), since that would increase difficulty.

I wish the game map had just one tile of more height, then I could make the perfect maze for ground leeches :)

Game doesn't seem to respond to my mouse all that much. It doesn't start the game when I click it but I can start it by pressing space. I can move the cannon around after pressing f with my mouse but I can't fire. Can you fix so I can play?

davidmaletz responds:

That's strange - it works fine in Chrome and Firefox for me. What browser are you using? Feel free to respond with a private message, as I don't believe you can respond via the review.

Also, I did upload one potential fix, but I have no way of testing if it works since I don't know what browser causes the problem.

Credits & Info

Views
15,206
Faves:
13
Votes
199
Score
3.01 / 5.00

Uploaded
May 28, 2017
10:13 PM EDT