netcrawler
A deckbuilding tower defence game about defending your servers from attackers on the net.
Instructions
- Keep your servers online as you defend
them against attackers sending bad packets (red).
Receive credits from user packets (blue). - Place tile modules (cards) from your console (hand)
(click on the card to select it, then click on the grid to place it)
onto the 4x4 grid to connect your servers to the net.
The tiles contain both paths and some contain defence systems.
However the defence systems decay over 3 waves.
You'll need to replace them regularly to ensure you are protected. - You can acquire new modules from the cache (supply) in exchange for credits.
- Double click the module to buy, if you have enough credits.
- If there's nothing you want to buy, you can flush the cache once per wave for 1 credit.
- As well as tile modules there are also action modules (green and yellow)
- Yellow: placed over tiles
- Green: played directly (double click)
- Action modules (green and yellow)
- Yellow: placed over tiles
- Green: played directly (double click)
- Tile modules
- Action modules (green and yellow)
- Yellow: placed over tiles
- Green: played directly (double click)
- Action modules (green and yellow)
- At the end of a wave:
- Your defence systems decay (represented by the yellow dots below them), after 3 waves they will be non-functional and the module needs to be replaced.
- Your credits are capped at the number of servers you have online.
- Your console (hand) is discarded into the stack (discard).
- 5 new modules (cards) are drawn from your deque (draw pile).
- A new wave will begin and packets will begin to appear from the net or infected servers.
- Each server regains one health.
- If bad packets reach one of your servers it will take damage, if it sustains 8 damage it will become an infected server. Which is another source of bad packets on your network. You can use ANTI.VIR to restore it and regain health. (currently a bug, you need to play it on a tile in the column of the server)
- You must always maintain a connection from at least one of your servers to the net. The more servers connected the more users will spawn at the start of a wave, giving you more money, but it will also be accessible to more attackers, so be careful. If you lose connection for 10 seconds, the game is over.
Title font by https://www.patreon.com/somepx/
Comments
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Interesting concept!
Though runs too slow here (Firefox)... Got bored at a score of 683 on wave 77, with a setup where it seemed like I could go a looong way further (a few restore old defences, draw 2, upgrade & repair, stack top to console, with a well populated playfield connecting everything). I like the idea, just really needs some optimization in my opinion.
I would love to see a remake of this, it's a really fun concept
I had encountered this, thought you should know
What ratio is this game screen made for? It cuts off the right side of the screen for me. Unplayable
Works for me on a 16:10 screen but it should work on anything.
Are you playing in fullscreen mode or in the frame?
Neither solve the bug for me. I'm on a 1440x900 resolution. It might be my browser. I have been having trouble on other stable apps this week. I'll download a couple today and fk around
It seems to be a problem with my resolution and browser. I was using the edge browser
Best score is 285!
339!
345!
535!
round 72 and counting
edit: round 109 because i was stupid and made the system go offline
edit: round 167
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Episode 26: Tower Defense
http://scrachingtheitch.libsyn.com/
This is nice, but sadly poorly balanced. A lot of the tiles aren't very useful, and the optimal strat is extremely static and ridiculously powerful.
Namely, you want to build a network where hostile packets go through as many turrets as possible, and then use STK.TRASH to get rid of everything except: 1x RSTR.BKP, 2x UPGRD.DEF, 1x STK.TRASH (since you can't get rid of it)
This way, you are guaranteed to be able to restore all turrets from backup every turn, as well as upgrade 4 times per turn on which you do not use RSTR.BKP, or an average of 3 if you do, which with turrets decaying over 3 turns, means you can keep 4-5 tiles upgraded at ALL times - and if they're tiles with 4 turrets on them - nice.
There also seems to be three bugs that I can tell: Lategame(wave 70+), only virus packets spawn, they seem to spawn mostly on the left(unless it spawns more in lanes with more turrets?), and turrets on the rightmost edge of the map do not get repaired by RSTR.BKP.
Ex. typical lategame wave(all in leftmost lane were killed, there is never any in rightmost):
I agree! I liked the idea but it was difficult to balance (especially the economy) and make an interesting strategy.
I'd like to play with the idea more in the future.
Well, the inflow of credits is relatively constant, you could tune it relatively easily, or add sinks. E.g. have repairing consume credits without a "repair all" card, and more limited or niche repair/upgrade cards
After that, to limit frustration, perhaps you could switch turrets over to consuming ammo rather than passively decaying, with some kinda faux system, like... say, each next shot within a wave uses less ammo, so that turrets are unlikely to run out within one wave, and almost guaranteed to run out in a few of shooting at all.
For interactivity, I think it'd be cool if turrets were on turret slots, with the ability to replace individual ones using cards - maybe even add new slots, or give tiles abilities like "pay 1 to switch lane direction", "pay 2 to erect a destructible blockade", that you can add/replace with one-time cards, so you develop your tiles over time(ones that go to stack wouldn't regenerate their turrets, here, I think)
Could also be cool to have a bigger map, since currently horizontal tiles don't have much of an use.
after a while it seemed like I bought all the good stuff from the market (cache) and my deck couldn't improve anymore - that's when I quit playing. would be cool if that was somehow changed. There's also room for ideas like tiles granting an extra flush or card draw per round, which would be cool. Otherwise neat game, fun for the first 50 waves or so.
I love this game. High score, 1742.
i cant use the store the game screen is too big for my monitor i can only just about tell what i could buy but i cant see the price or buy anything.
did this just get "updated"? -_-
not yet!
As an avid td-player this feels very original and unique to me. It's a shame it's only one endless mode and not levels or unlocks or any kind of meta progression. I like this a lot but I suppose since it's ludum dare it's a fire and forget kind of thing? I'd love to see some more work on this.