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We hope you’re ready for another Game of the Month, because it’s that time again! For the unfamiliar, Game of the Month is a programme where Evercade VS and Evercade EXP owners (along with Evercade VS-R, EXP-R and Alpha owners once those systems launch!) can download a new, independently developed game for free every month between April and December. You can enjoy the full version of the game without limits right up until the next update, at which point it will be replaced with something completely new to try. Next year, all of the Game of the Month titles for this year, plus a few exclusive extras, will be collected together on the Indie Heroes Collection 4 cartridge, likely to drop in February.
Game of the Month for August 2024 is Collie Defense, a title designed for 32-bit handheld. It’s a “tower defense” strategy game in which you take on the role of a brave Border Collie attempting to defend his flock from hordes of predators.
Collie Defense is the work of Yann Valiant, also known online as “vayan”. The game was originally developed using a variety of tools, including popular sprite editor Aseprite and LDtk, a level editor by the director of popular indie hit Dead Cells. It was initially released in prototype form for the GBA Jam 2022 event hosted by the enthusiast developer community at gbadev.net, and the game came in overall joint third place out of 26 entrants — although due to there being a physical prize on offer for the third-place position, Collie Defense sadly lost out to its rival entry in tie-break proceedings!
After the initial game jam, John Roo of The Retro Room (who has previously brought us Indie Heroes such as Quest Arrest on Indie Heroes Collection 1 and Gelatinous: Humanity Lost on Indie Heroes Collection 2) took an interest in the project and launched a Kickstarter to produce a full physical release of the game. The crowdfunding effort was successful, comfortably raising $10,890 out of a $10,000 goal in September of 2023, and the physical releases for the original platform started shipping out in January of this year.
In Collie Defense, you take on the role of Whisky the Border Collie, who watches over a flock of sheep. But it seems an army of predators has organised, and is now advancing on Whisky’s position! Now it’s up to you to help him defend his flock using a selection of towers, quick reactions and your strategic mind!
To navigate the game’s menu screen, use the D-Pad to move the cursor, B to confirm selections and A to back out of a menu. (Note that due to the original host platform having its buttons labelled the opposite way around to Evercade, any time the game asks you to press “A”, you should actually press B, and vice versa.)
If you’ve never played a tower defense game before, the concept is simple: enemies will advance along one or more “lanes” (indicated in Collie Defense by the pathways) and attempt to reach your home base (the edge of the screen in this case). If an enemy reaches your home base, you lose a life. Lose all your lives before defeating all the enemies in a level and you lose. Beat all the enemies without losing all your lives and you win.
The twist is that you can’t attack the enemies directly: you have to build towers to attack on your behalf. To do this in Collie Defense, press the A button to bring up a menu of towers, then use the D-Pad and B to choose a tower. Once you’ve picked a tower, move it to the position you’d like to place it and press B again to build it. When placing a tower, the shaded circle around it indicates the tower’s effective area: any enemies in this area can be attacked by the tower, but be careful: most towers can only attack one target at a time.
As you progress through Collie Defense, you’ll get access to more towers. The tower menu indicates each type of tower’s statistics, along with how much it costs to build. You earn more money with each defeated enemy, so place your initial towers wisely. A good strategy is to put towers on the inside of corners, because this tends to maximise the amount of time enemies spend in their area of effect.
There are two ways to play Collie Defense: the Story Mode, which sends you through a linear sequence of levels, carrying money forward to each new level (don’t overbuild!), and the High Score Mode, which allows you to pick any individual level and attempt to complete it as efficiently as possible. Once you’ve beaten the level, you’ll be given a letter grade. You can share your overall completion of the game by choosing the “Share Score” option from the game’s main menu and scanning the QR code that comes up with a mobile device; this will generate an image that you can save and share on social media showing your story mode completion statistics, and the grade you have attained on each of the High Score levels.
Collie Defense starts simple and straightforward but becomes quite challenging by its later levels! Are you up to the challenge of defending Whisky’s flock? Only one way to find out, now, isn’t there…?
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To get started with Collie Defense and the Game of the Month programme for 2024, connect your Evercade VS or EXP to the Internet via the Network option in Settings, then perform a system update to the latest available firmware version.
When you’re all updated, you’re ready to go — start the game through the VS or EXP logo on the left of the main Evercade menu and get set for some flock-defending!
Note that we always recommend Evercade users keep their consoles up to date as a matter of course to ensure maximum compatibility with new cartridge releases and implement fixes to known issues. Please see the Evercade support pages for full patch notes; all new firmware updates are cumulative, so update once and you’ll see all the benefits.
Please note that saves from the Game of the Month edition of Collie Defense will not carry across to the Indie Heroes Collection 4 cartridge when that releases in February of 2025 (TBC).
Quelle: Blaze Entertainment