Tower Defence Games

[Faille]

Anyone tried making any tower defence games and have any advice on where to start? Would they be worth making for XNA / xbox or better to just stick with web / flash ?

[Cloud9_]

Originally Posted by Faille

Anyone tried making any tower defence games and have any advice on where to start? Would they be worth making for XNA / xbox or better to just stick with web / flash ?

Have not tried, although I thought about it.. Tower Defense for the Zune would be pretty cool

I would probably start with the map / editor, then get the enemies in place (i figure they would be the easiest to do), then focus on the towers and their upgrade-ability and effects and such. I dont think it would be too hard, maybe a days worth of coding if you have a clear goal in mind?

[x1hundredregrets]

Depends on the platform honestly. If you're targetting the PC or the Wii, Torque has some really nice functionality built in, like a Gun Turret baseclass etc.

Flash is obviously really good for web related platforms, but you'd have to write a lot of the functionality yourself, like turret tracking, and enemy pathing.

Suffice to say, if you've never done it before its a fair undertaking. You'll get caught coding a lot of border cases and errors, like enemies dying while towers are targetting them, etc. It's a really good learning expeirence though.

[Faille]

I should start out making some simple ones, but the one I eventually want to create is a little more elaborate. It would be based around defending a harbor town from invading ships. So you have 2 types of tower defense, one against the ships before the land, and one against the soldiers after they have disembarked from the ships. The ability to incorporate cut scene style story elements between the waves, or at trigger points (such as the first ship to offload troops, or reach certain points on the map) would also be desirable.


As a side note, anyone seen any 2 player version or have an idea on how effective it might be? One side building the towers, and the other choosing the type of mobs to send in each wave.

[x1hundredregrets]

Originally Posted by Faille

I should start out making some simple ones, but the one I eventually want to create is a little more elaborate. It would be based around defending a harbor town from invading ships. So you have 2 types of tower defense, one against the ships before the land, and one against the soldiers after they have disembarked from the ships. The ability to incorporate cut scene style story elements between the waves, or at trigger points (such as the first ship to offload troops, or reach certain points on the map) would also be desirable.


As a side note, anyone seen any 2 player version or have an idea on how effective it might be? One side building the towers, and the other choosing the type of mobs to send in each wave.

Can't forsee anyway to make it fun for the person sending mobs.

[Cloud9_]

Originally Posted by x1hundredregrets

Can't forsee anyway to make it fun for the person sending mobs.

I can, if you do it right..

or you could have 2 "towns" and you have to defend your town while sending MOBs to the other town, you choose how to split your resources.

[Zuuljin]

I actually made one just for kicks for my cell phone. Its fairly simplistic (as cell phone games must be), and it was a bit harder than I thought. I was thinking of porting it over to XNA and touching it up a bit, but I got a new job so I've been busy. Maybe one day....

The main problem was balance though. I had this great idea in my head of how to balance it, but when it came down to it, nothing was balanced at all. I never did bother balancing it as it was just an experiment to see if I could make it.

Also the cell phone interface didnt work as well as I'd hoped.

[Faille]

Originally Posted by Cloud9_

I can, if you do it right..

or you could have 2 "towns" and you have to defend your town while sending MOBs to the other town, you choose how to split your resources.

That's a much better idea. Could do that single player against an AI as well, though would probably need much more work on the AI side.

[Faille]

Started playing around with Flash to try and accomplish this, but tbh I really have no idea what I'm doing. I can follow tutorials and get them working, but I think I need a lot more understanding before I can break out of those into actually creating something. Also, seems like I'll need a lot of little graphics done, which isn't my strong point.

I'll keep plugging away though and keep you posted!

[Hatorade]

Warcraft 3 editor Gem TD and Eeve Td are awesome.

[TwiNCannoN]

I'm pretty surprised the casual game market hasn't started producing a ton of these yet. Obviously flash games have exploded with it so it's only natural that people would pay for it.

Warcraft : Tower Defense kicks a lot of ass also.

[Big Mant]

Thanks for linking that DS version. Badass indeed for a homebrew.

[Faille]

Originally Posted by TwiNCannoN

I'm pretty surprised the casual game market hasn't started producing a ton of these yet. Obviously flash games have exploded with it so it's only natural that people would pay for it.

Warcraft : Tower Defense kicks a lot of ass also.

Well I did find Tower Defence.net, for your tower defence games which has a list of tower defense games, both flash and downloadable. Looks like there is quite a few of them.

[Chrisb3]

Sending mobs has been done before in Warcraft 3. It was pretty fun, each player both sent mobs and defended against enemy ones. Only one TD did it so it's pretty undeveloped.

[Believe]

Shit tons of TDs have let you send mobs, I don't know what you're talking about. You get gold for killing the enemy, then you buy units to send to the enemy(s). Also, most of them gave you money every minute or so, and you increased how much money you received by sending units to the enemy (each unit earned you a certain amount of gold)