Keep the Black Cats distracted before they curse your towers, and catch the Critters before the Witch can put them in her pot!
\nCan you get 3 stars on all 7 waves?!
\nHold (Desktop: mouse / Mobile: touch) + Drag to place towers.
\nWhile dragging, the towers are offset (left or right) from touch point to better see the tower coverage and placement. To switch the offset side while dragging, move your finger to the far right side of the screen.
\nAndroid: If Chrome has loading or audio issues (hopefully fixed) Firefox should still work.
\niPhone Everything works, it’s just an extra tiny game without full screen. iOS tablets should be more enjoyable.
\n","source":"BenjaminWFox/Familiar-js13k-2025","stars":0,"comments":[{"at":410399588,"author":"Rob Louie","login":"roblouie","gh":5448110,"url":"roblouie.com","twitter":"rob_louie","text":"I can definitely see what you were trying to go for, and there are some very cool ideas here, but I think a couple things are holding this game back.
\nFirst, the drag drop system for placing defense items is frustrating. Usually tower defense games show you a little preview of where your item will drop, with a sort of snap-to-grid system so it’s easy to place them. Even if you attempt to misplace your item, you can just click again to place it in the right spot. Here its drag and drop, and if you accidentally drop in the wrong place, even by one pixel, you have to then go back to the sidebar and drag the item back over. By this time, its too late.
\nSecondly, part of the appeal of tower defense games is building up your defense over time by upgrading items for each wave. Here you have to start over every time in a new stage.
\nI think if you tweaked these concepts and added some more variety, this would be quite a good game. You have the core pieces here, if you tweak the gameplay a bit, I’d love to play it again!
\n—EDIT TO ANSWER QUESTION—\nRegarding the puzzle-td thing, I think there’s potential there as well which could certainly justify the individual stages. However due to the fast pace of the enemies and limit of one or two items to place…I guess I never felt like there was a puzzle I needed to solve? I just grabbed the thing I was allowed and put it on the path as fast as I could.
\nI think exploring that idea could be really fun, but it would need more explanation, slower moving enemies, and more options to choose from maybe? Something to help me understand the puzzles, how different items affected different enemies, and like very clear deliniations of that. Like if certain items only affect cats, first give me one level with only cats, but still give me access to all items, but highlight the one for cats. Idk, something like that to help introduce the concepts, and then set me loose with different enemy types & traps. And make the enemies slower so I can react to what is appearing. Thats my take anyway
\n","games":["Whiskers Witch Adventure"]},{"typ":1,"at":410469132,"re":410399588,"author":"Ben Fox","login":"BenjaminWFox","gh":9467046,"twitter":"benjaminwfox","text":"Great feedback, thanks! I’d thought about the placement issue, but ran out of time to improve it.
\nCurious re: the second observation, if I’d described it as Tower Defense meets Puzzle game if that would have changed your expectation?
\nI had originally planned a more TD-specific gameplay, but the balancing fun+difficulty for that style was much more challenging than I expected!
\n"},{"at":410434051,"author":"Ryan Tyler","login":"tyler6699","gh":50468,"url":"https://carelesslabs.co.uk","text":"Well made tower defence, like the options you have with different types of attack options.
\nLove the animations of the little guys picking up the enemies for money!
\n","games":["Yarn Run"]},{"at":410513291,"author":"xem","login":"xem","gh":1225909,"text":"Well done! Nice tower defense-ish game. Congrats on graphics and audio. The UI and controls are not super intuitive.
\n","games":["I got up on the wrong foot"]},{"at":410515142,"author":"Andrew Higson-Smith","login":"ElementalSystems","gh":4255763,"url":"www.elementalsystems.co.za","text":"Nice implementation of a tower defence - cute graphics.
\n","games":["Wake the Cat"]},{"at":410560703,"author":"Cliff Earl","login":"Antix-Development","gh":17822130,"text":"Nice tower defense game, really good. It’s difficult to sometimes drag the towers to where you want them.
\nNice graphics and audio!
\n","games":["Black Cat - Nine Lives, No Mercy"]},{"at":410687809,"author":"Andy Sommerville","login":"aksommerville","gh":1869768,"url":"http://aksommerville.com","text":"Very well made. I’m not much into this kind of game, but the animations and the witchy aesthetic made it fun. The witch’s mumbling to herself had me giggling, too.
\nOne low-hanging fruit you might grab: The styling difference between “can afford” and “can’t afford” in the inventory is too subtle. Maybe gray out the images of the can’t-afford ones, to make it super obvious at a glance.
\n","games":["Nine Lives"]},{"at":410756572,"author":"Zang0l0tino","login":"Zang0l0tino","gh":167128079,"text":"The game is rather fun to play, but there is one of the following:
\nGood game, tough but challenging. Having to defend different paths every time was an interesting change for the usual tower defense style games. The size of the font and the colours made it hard to read what was below some of the weapons at times.
\n","games":["Chickpocalypse Meow"]},{"at":411210354,"author":"Elias Ku","login":"eliasku","gh":3038174,"url":"https://eliasku.win","twitter":"eliaskuvoice","text":"Neat concept and great pixel art! I really liked the music and the animations.\nIt’s a bit of a shame I never quite figured out how to get three stars on every level, but I still had a lot of fun playing!\nIt’s cool that the game shows your progress at the end and lets you replay your favorite levels. I also enjoyed the variety of traps.\nThanks for the game! 🙂
\n","games":["Cat Survivors"]},{"at":411347789,"author":"John Edvard","login":"johnedvard","gh":656024,"url":"https://reitgames.com","twitter":"ReitGames","text":"It’s nice to see the improvements since the first alpha version. I like this polished version a lot more. It’s better with the “3/3 stars” type of levels, and the waves aren’t as fast as they used to be. A lot more balanced and easier to play.
\nThe graphics are minimalistic and fit well together.
\n","games":["Triska the Ninja Cat"]},{"at":411439762,"author":"Surma","login":"surma","gh":234957,"url":"https://surma.dev","text":"I love a good tower defense, and this is a great take on the genre. I like the setting a lot, although it’s definitely hard. The placing of towers is a bit punishing, especially on a trackpad. If I slip one tile to an invalid position, I now have to re-select the tower from the menu, meanwhile the wave will advance. Would be nice to keep the tower selected and be able to try placing it again.
\nGreat job on the music and the sounds and for providing multiple levels.
\n","games":["Swing A Cat"]},{"at":411569954,"author":"Raptor Dev","login":"raptor0999","gh":74460924,"twitter":"Raptor_IndieDev","text":"Wow, this game is freaking awesome!
\nI’ve only played around 10 or 15 entries so far but this one is the best so far I think. I’m not particularly into tower defense but this is such a good complete entry that it is really fun!
\nI think one of the best parts besides the controls and the abilities is that the build up and progression is so good. Instead of thrusting all of these types on the player at the beginning you build up one by one and then start letting the player do a bit of what they want to with them after that.
\nThe music is pretty entrancing while you are playing through the levels also.
\nGreat job!
\n","games":["Boots and the Black Cauldron"]},{"at":411694667,"author":"Jasper Renow-Clarke","login":"picosonic","gh":26137750,"twitter":"femtosonic","text":"A fun tower-defence type game
\nThe mechanics were pretty good
\nThe graphics were fun, although lots of different scaling, so pixels sizes were a little disparate
\nI liked all the different waves of characters and the corresponding defences
\nSeveral times I go down to 1 critter, but I never made it to 0
\n","games":["Mochi and the midnight escape"]},{"typ":2,"at":411720882,"author":"Jedidiah Weller","login":"jedihacks","gh":996175,"url":"www.openforge.io","twitter":"jedihacks","text":"Hey Ben,
\nGreat work on this submission. The music was superb so gave that full marks, probably the best I’ve heard in the 32 games I reviewed. The audio is good all around.
\nAlso great work on the variety of the types of towers. I know that can often be a hard part of game design is figuring out what the mechanics can be.
\nFrom a UI perspective I’d suggest having a more clear line item/distinction between each of the available towers that you can drag. Just something as simple as cards for each one to have clear hierarchy of information would be a major improvement.
\nOverall a great submission, good work!
\nI recorded my play through so that you could see my first reaction to it and the way I used it. This is often helpful from a user experience perspective to see what someone does the first time. https://youtube.com/live/jl6pC4OnVJA
\nGreat work on the submission and best of luck in the competition!
\n"},{"typ":2,"at":411724685,"author":"Victor Debone","login":"debone","gh":763457,"url":"https://javascri.pl/","twitter":"javascripl","text":"Thanks for your submission! First, I can’t know how much effort you’ve put on the game, so don’t mind me if I get cliché or repeat ideas you simply didn’t get the time (or kb) to finish. Second, great you have finished this experience!
\nGreat work on having a lot of mechanics going on with your tower defence! Also it features many enemies, some twists with the cats, and a lot of variety with the towers. And they all evoked a very congruent fantasy – the kids, the critters, the witch soup! I loved it.
\nI liked that you set out a challenge right off the start and made it a full arc – there was easier levels, it introduced mechanics and then set out some challenging levels.
\nI think you could improve the flow of the tutorial popups. One of those even acknowledged that you needed to act fast after closing the popup :)
\nThe flow was also interrupted often by the need to drag the towers from the sidebar and then placing them into the map, when the collision boxes helped. I had to restart levels many times because I missed twice in a row placing a tower and then a critter managed to pass.
\n"},{"at":412009463,"author":"Luke Nickerson","login":"Lukenickerson","gh":3942453,"url":"http://lukenickerson.github.io/","text":"A solid tower-defense game. My main criticism is that it goes a bit too fast – I needed more time to get used to the gameplay and rules of each new item. Other than that, it was quite enjoyable, with good sound, good graphics, and some amusing writing. (“Haha, no soup for the witch! She is very sad”)
\n","games":["Crafty Cauldron"]}],"results":{"theme":{"rank":87,"min":1,"score":3.1,"max":4.24},"innovation":{"rank":101,"min":1.2,"score":2.6,"max":4.03},"gameplay":{"rank":44,"min":1.18,"score":3.25,"max":4.37},"graphics":{"rank":58,"min":1.6,"score":3.4,"max":4.56},"audio":{"rank":54,"min":1.75,"score":3.15,"max":4.22},"controls":{"rank":86,"min":1.6,"score":3.1,"max":4.45},"primary":{"rank":56,"min":8.68,"score":18.6,"max":24.89},"label":"Overall"}}