Well, the Liberated Pixel Cup has ended. There are 48 games competing, and I’m taking my time reviewing them all.
A fair disclaimer: I’m also competing in the Cup. I’ll try to be unbiased though, judge for yourself and give the games a try!
Castle Defense [Play me online!] [Download me!]
This is an HTML5 “Tower Defense” game but with a rather unique twist: You have to solve math problems to activate your towers.
There are archers with simple math problems positioned strategically to hit the spawning skeletons. Answer the problem correctly and the archer shoots. There is no a penalty for guessing though,which is an exploit that I saw my brother quickly abuse by slamming numbers until he got one right in the higher levels.
I really enjoyed this simple game. The presentation is fantastic, the idea is clever and the execution is well done.
Update: There is a penalty for guessing: Your score is lowered every time you guess wrong. My brother’s exploit only serves to explore the higher levels but your score will always near zero.
the game is cute, but as i have ‘find as you type’ enabled, very hard to play, i should disable it in order to play (as soon as i enter one digit, the find dialog appears and it get the focus)
Oh, I see how that could be a problem with just about any web game though
Math problems!? Is that what you have to do to play this game? I could not figure it out…
I’m not sure if you’re being sarcastic, but I’ll bite.
The game’s controls are easy: Just type in the answer to the simple math problem that appears below each archer. You should see your answer show up where the = sign is, below the screen.
I need to leave some positive feedback for this game because most people will pass it over and the ones who really need to play it will definitely want to play something else. That said, this is a great project! Much needed and very well executed. The game concept is very good. This caught my eye because just yesterday I whipped up a short Python math game for my kid. Not fun in any way, but more sensible than the dead tree approach. This game is actually quite fun. My main feature request is an easy way for teachers to customize the sorts of questions being asked. I downloaded a local copy of the game and customized LevelsDB.js but I wish there were some comments in there that helped me more easily figure out what was possible. But I got the problems I wanted in this terrific game, so thanks very much to the author! The author, BTW, could be a bit more bold with his contact info. Good luck to this project.
I’ve been telling everyone that has asked me that I believe this is one of the most polished games of the contest, and it certainly deserves recognition.
Hi, I’m the author of Castle Defense. Thanks for the positive feedback! The game is now available for free on the Chrome Web Store at https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/castle-defense/nncfndkncipgjllghidmfjpoligggibk. Feel free to leave a review there, and to contact me through the “Submit Feeback” mechanism in the store.
If you enjoyed Castle Defense, you might also like another HTML5 puzzle/action game I wrote, called BIPS. Check it out at the Chrome Web Store at https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bips/mjepobmhjpfincikgcmppmbjkeodlgko or online at http://bipsland.com.
(Wow, Google needs to do something about those long link URLs.