Aggressive Sales Tactics

Thank you for all the amazing feedback!  We plan to keep polishing Aggressive Sales Tactics into a FULL RELEASE!. This full release will include more clear UI, proper balancing, and an in game tutorial to slowly teach you the mechanics, rather than needing to read Matt's wall of text.

Aggressive Sales Tactics is a game made in just 48 hours for Game Maker's Toolkit Game Jam 2023.  The theme of the jam was 'Roles Reversed', where we were tasked with making a game where players would take on a role that they don't normally get to play.  

Aggressive Sales Tactics approaches this theme from two different angles.  It is a reverse tower defense game where the player spawns units to walk down a path and attack hostile towers.  However it is also a merchant simulator.  In most games the player would buy things from a merchant, but there are few games where you play as a merchant.  In this game you will need to find a balance between sending units promptly down the path to eliminate the towers before they overrun the town, and keeping them in your store long enough for them to spend a little more coin for you to upgrade your shop and make even more profit!

How to play:

This game is played exclusively with the mouse and the P key to pause.   Every few seconds, a customer will arrive at the shop, and they're represented by the buttons at the bottom of the screen.  At the start you can have up to two customers at once, but you can upgrade the size of the store to fit more by paying gold.  Each customer has a semi-random amount of gold to spend in your shop, which you can see below their portrait.   Periodically every costumer in the store will buy a small item, starting at five gold.  The more customers in your store, the more money you get.  

However, you can't just focus on profits.  Outside of the town hostile towers are spawning, and if all of them are standing for too long it's game over.  When you click on a customer, you can then select a weapon on the left side of the screen to give them.  If the customer has enough gold to purchase it, it's all profit.  But if they're short some gold, that difference is coming out of your pocket.  It's worth the cost keeping your store safe and in business.  Some weapons are more powerful and have more range, but cost more.  It's up to you to find the right balance.  

And with all that extra profit, you can click buttons on the right side of the screen to upgrade your shop.  You can spend money to upgrade your shop in three areas: The size of your shop to fit more customers at once to a maximum of seven.  How many customers show up all at once for the crazy new items you dished out the cash for.  And finally how much gold each customer spends every few seconds.

Let us know how much total gold you were able to obtain!

Credits: 

Developers: Maciej Janiak, Matt Chandler, Yuliya Bogonos

Game Designers: Maciej Janiak and Matt Chandler

2D Artist: Áiron Bruce

3D Artist: Jaryn MacInnes

Production: Matt Chandler

Sound Effect Designer: MCGDGamer

3D assets used for environment:

https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/en-US/product/fantastic-village-pack

Background music used in version 1.2 by David Renda, from Fesliyan Studios.
Credit to https://www.FesliyanStudios.com for the background music.

Gameplay music in the game jam version was created using a large amount samples of Eight BIT composed by Sasa Djordjevic, linked below.