Monday 10 September 2012

Tower Defense

Hey everyone,

The blog has been a little quiet and empty lately. I haven't had much time to work on Flash Games but in the last few days i've started working on a Tower Defense engine, it's a genre i've wanted to break into for a while.

I'm planning to get the engine working, build a small(ish) game to test it then add features based on feedback from the game. Obviously there are many different varieties of Tower Defense whether it be grid based ones where the enemies find a path based on where you place your towers or the more classic ones where they follow a path.

So far my TD engine has the following features:
  • Intuitive path creation system which allows level paths to be created easily without any extra code.
  • Multiple Enemy types, including Ground, Flying and Boss units.
  • Multiple Tower types with different buff abilities such as "Slow", "Stun" and "Poison".
  • Towers which target Ground enemies only, Air enemies only or both types.
  • The ability to select the target type for each tower - Closest Enemy, Fastest, Weakest or Strongest.
  • The ability to upgrade towers to make them better/stronger.
Obviously these are all fairly common place features and don't do much to make my engine stand out. That's where my main big feature comes from.

When the player isn't building towers in "Build Mode", they can take control of a character (Webby in the case of my test game) and move around the play area collecting extra resources. This not only adds the extra element of resource gathering but also adds an extra risk that hitting any of the enemies moving along the path will cost a life in the same as if they reached the end.

The engine is still in a very early stage and there are a few bugs to work out but this could hopefully turn out to be a powerful (and hopefully easy and intuitive to use) engine which I might make available for other people to use when it's finished.

In the mean time, what features do you like to see in a TD? What else would you like to see in my TD engine?

Let me know in the comments.

- Nutter


3 comments:

  1. Anything which is new and stands out from the others. Some games seem to already have the clicking method you mentioned, which is tower defence. I'll try and find a source.
    How is your going to be unique?
    Tell us more about how your engine would build a different game.

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    1. That's kind of the point of this post, I know that so far this is mostly generic stuff for a TD engine, which is why im hopinh people will suggest stuff to make it different.

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  2. I had an idea once for a td, never really abandoned it but it definitely got shelved till I have spare time for it

    I'd suggest towers that play off one another, give eachother boosters or extra upgrades, it'd be nice if each tower had secondary upgrades and levels
    such as a gun tower having an extra barrel and each barrel has its own level

    and if it's near say a poison tower maybe it could do some poison damage as well or make the subsequent poison do more damage since it'd be (in theory) getting directly into open wounds
    more upgrades the better, rate of fire, damage, status effects, specials

    my idea was a sci fi laser type thing that was overly intricate, to the point I worried if I made it too complicated

    I'd suggest for research you check out classics like desktop td and defense grid

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