Defender of The Grove

It looks great! The idea that the plan grows as you progress is a nice touch and a good idea to mix in a otherwise UI progress bar directly to the character, the particle effects are nice, and the down [S] smash has a nice feel to it. However that's sadly that about what I can say about it. The controls work well enough, but the gameplay itself is extremely lacking.

The AI is way to simple and direct, with them just rushing you no matter what makes the difficulty is just frustrating and creates a gameplay where you have to try and "cheese" your way into killing one at a time, and as one hit set you back its very unforgiving. The enemy movement just makes you constantly unsafe and therefore cant really use the map more then to try and fool the enemies in getting stuck so you can take them out without getting hit.

I think it would have just been a better idea to make the enemies use very simple walk patterns instead (walking constantly forward, turn on walls, etc. add in random jumps now and then?), so that I as a player, can use use the level itself to find good vantage points and plan a kill as they come by. Later you could add spawns that has a follow pattern to increase the difficulty (I would however, not make them as fast as they are now)

The level design is classic (if a bit boring) and visually its awesome! This is the type of pixel-art I really enjoy. Some more levels would have been interesting to see.

A good start! Needs a bit more design time (also sounds etc. I think you know the rest.) Great work.

Cheers.

Really nice, funny action game. Playing is really smooth and fluid, which is important in a game this fast-paced. I like that the "character" itself is the indicator of your progress, so there's no need for any HUD elements. Despite the pace, it's an easy-going game, since you really can only end the game by winning or quitting by yourself. Would probably work well as a multiplayer game too, I think.

We'd be glad to have this game in our contest, the Game Development World Championship!