Parazyte

I didn't encounter any game-stopping bugs. This was kind of fun — it's relaxing, in a way. I like games where I can sit back and let things happen. On the other hand, you could make this game a bit more challenging. It was very easy for me to fill up the grid after a couple of waves. You could have a faster pace for the waves, and also tougher bugs. Also, it would help if I had an indicator of how many points I have for placing fungi.

I like the graphics and the tick-tock rhythm. The animation is a nice touch, and there is something homey about the fungi.

@heyheyhey Thank you for playing! I truly appreciate the kind words and the feedback. Yeah. I wasn't able to make the next waves challenging. It was about 10 min left when I started integrating the audio, and I haven't finished writing the other enemy lines. I'll definitely include your suggestions later. Thank you, again!

Cute game! I was a bit confused in the beginning, because I couldn't buy anything. I think it would be nice to have some MP to start with.
I read the description at the start (Maybe it would be nice to also show what each mushroom does when hovering over them in the top panel), so I saw that the Symbiote helped gaining MP, but I was surprised that it didn't attack! It seemed like that after placing a Symbiote, I could remove it and I still get the MP gaining benefits.
After a slow start, I quickly filled up the grid with mushrooms. At some point the game was a bit laggy.
The waves are too slow for my taste, I didn't want to wait till I lost. Oh wait, I just kept the game running in the background while writing this, and apparently I won! :D
I like the cute little mushrooms and insects! Well done :)

Thank you for the feedback, @Papaver. I forgot to decrease the MP when Symbiotes are removed. That was a good observation. Also, I'll definitely work on improving the game's difficulty, speed, and most especially the fps. I made the huge mistake of running both the updates and rendering in 14 fps so I'll look into it. Thank you, again!

This was fun. I wish the game was longer!

@euske Working on it! I'm already improving the local version. It will be better in the next update, which I will upload after the event. Thanks for playing!

Welcome to Alakajam! That's a cool first entry, congrats!
Love the pixel art and animations. As a PvZ and Tower Defense lover, I have a couple of gameplay suggestions:

• The amount of different fungi is small. That's totally fine for a gamejam, the problem is, that one of them is an objectively better version of the other. That kind of brings the number even further down. What I would suggest is having one mushroom that only hits the flying enemies introduced later instead of the stronger, green mushroom.

• The shovel should give you back a little of the mp spent for the fungus, as this can lead to cool tight scenarios where you quickly have to delete on fungus in one row to be able to build an important one in another.

Other than that, I agree with what others said before me. You have a solid framework here and you can be proud of what you achieved in the short time! :)

@Cuddl3s thank you for the feedback! I really like your shovel idea. It adds more usability to the tool. As for the first suggestion: yeah I wasn't able to expand the traits of the fungi. The Weccan was supposed to be a low damage fungus but with slow effect. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to implement the slow effect logic due to the lack of time. I'll integrate your suggestions later. Thank you for playing!

The mushrooms' eyes totally sell it for me, this is one great art style! Gameplay-wise, I'd suggest two things: A button to skip waves and maybe a different mechanic for the symbiotes. Once you have two columns of them, there is no challenge in filling up the grid completely.

I won.
It took me a little while to understand the controls, the numbers on top of my keyboard didn't work only the numpad ones, which was unexpected. I never played any row based Tower Defense so was also initially confused why my mushrooms were not attacking the incoming insects. Anyway once I got over the initial hump It was fun, but then after the first wave I had enough defenses that there was no challenge.

Would suggest being a bit faster paced and adjusting more the difficulty curve and balancing to get the most fun out of the mechanics you have. The art was really cute and was the highlight for me. Nice to have some simple retro style SFX and music although music loop is so short it gets annoying pretty quickly.

Congrats on your first jam and going for hard mode and writing everything from scratch.

Thank you, @Synchronleuchter! I'm happy to know people liked my art style. I really enjoyed animating the mushrooms. Thank you for playing my game!

Thank you for the info, @automatonvx. I used a laptop to develop this game so I wasn't able to experience the keyboard issue. I'll look into it later. Also, thanks for the feedback on the music. I'll make sure to apply it in my post-ranking update. Thank you for playing!

This is a great game, very fun gameplay. I feel like the grid should be on by default though. I also think there should be a peice of text next to the slider to tell you exactly how much MP you have. Good Game :)

Nice PvZ homage. Initial screen is just black and I thought the game was bugged or something. Definitely include the keys on the game page! Also maybe show the grid by default. Felt like there wasn't too much of a challenge. I liked the mushroom sprites and the sounds effects, although the music track was a little too short and became repetitive quite fast.

Congrats on your first Alakajam entry. Great sprites, I was very impressed by the detail in the animaiton. I would agree with other comments. A solid start for a game, the level lacks challenge, and the sound track loop good old pretty fast. I was also a little confused at the start not being able to doing anything. Speeding up the game and balancing the levels would go a long way. Great work!

Great art and animations! I would have liked to be able to click on the top bar to select the fungi/shovel instead of using the keyboard.

I also played your game (that was unexpected o_O)!

I must say, I'm quite impress with the art and animation of the mushrooms and bugs, I really like your art style. The game is relaxing, with a simple gameplay, and I would play it with a little bit of adjustments.
Like my game, I think yours lack a tiny bit of balencing. I was disrupt by the fact that you couldn't select units with the mouse, and I reloaded the page because I thought it was a bug. And then I understood you needed to use the keyboard, so I was a bit disappointed.
I only lost one life during my gameplay, and it was because of a dumb mistake. After that, the game felt a bit easy and short. My final suggestion is that you add a background.

Nevertheless, you're game is quite good and I'm sure with all the suggestions people share to you, your game can be really good.

Great entry. The animations and art style are cerating a very nice flair.

The gameplay mechanics work good. It seems there is a bit of a performance issue when many enemies, shrooms and particles are on the screen.

Some things to improve:

• The time between waves was a bit long for me.
• Itwould have made sense to have some columns on the right side where enemies could spawn, but the player could not build. Currently all shrooms in the two rightmost columns are always destroyed by spawning zombies.
• it is a bit weird, that the player controls everything by mouse but then has to press 1,2,3,4, for the shrooms/tool. I suggest to make them clickable icons as well.

Other than that, great entry!

Thank you for your awesome entry :D
I played it during my thrid alaka gamejam stream
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1420488754?t=0h54m0s here is the link with the timestamp where your game starts :D

@xXBloodyOrange thank you for playing my game!

Nice to see new people here! This was a nice entry. The graphics are pretty cool. Love the idle animations and the upright snake/worm is swaying very satisfyingly. Some of the shooting sounds are satisfyingly bass heavy too. The game mechanics are technically ok. Some kind of "this fungi costs this much" indication would have been fine. There's no challenge in this game though. I have never made anything similar, but I feel like I have no idea how to balance this. Seems like a hard genre to pick for a jam. Well done!

Great job for a first jam entry! Balancing seems a bit off; I stopped around wave 5 where I got the whole field planted full of red and green mushrooms and the enemies stood no chance.

I particularly love the animations on the shrooms and insects. Well done!

It would be nice if there was some more strategy to it. Right now all the lanes seem to be made equal.