Updated on December 17, 2017
Into the Belly of the Beast
Hey all, It’s Halloween time which is a perfect time to do an update!
So what’s been happening the since the last update you ask? *Crickets noise* That’s okay I’ll tell you anyway. 😉 I’ve got our protagonists Dorian and Grub finalised and in the game, took longer than expected to explore them as characters but I’m happy with the result.
I’ve also been tightening the screws on a lot of Defend Yer Booty! tower-defense gameplay, locking down more arsenal weapons and as always slowly creating more levels. In particular, the enemy spawner has been getting the majority of attention and heavy tuning. I’m proud to say I’ve finally got something streamline and versatile. It grabs attributes from a level, attributes from prearranged enemy clusters chosen and then spits out a wave of enemies on timed intervals suitably challenging for the player who has has survived ‘x’ many waves. The result removes the need to manually craft too much of a level, allows a unique outcome per wave and a great potential for refreshing replay-ability and I haven’t even got to special wave occurrences yet!
Unlike a lot of tower-defense games, when you place “units” or “towers” you’re making a long standing strategical choice, where as Defend Yer Booty! will push the focus on short term placements and strategies. This is because enemies don’t spawn down a singular path and at some points will simultaneously come from different directions. This means everything the player will place is somewhat temporarily but also not crucial which allows for turn over and new strategy every wave. More importantly it means the player is still involved in defending against enemies and not just a character placing towers.
Besides balancing, working out how to splice an adventure experience with a tower-defense experience has been the other challenge. Rather than grabbing the best mechanics or features from each, I’ve had to find that sweet spot that plays and transitions as a fun journey that compliments one another as well. The adventure component becomes a series of minor tasks that adds flow to the story and transition between areas. The tower-defense component acts as the battle or a test throughout that journey arc/level.
Strategy/Adventure games like Pokemon and Brutal Legend have split gameplay functionality but do it in different ways. In Pokemon, all the playable conflict takes place in battle and battling is a completely different mode to the exploring and traversing of the world. Even though you carry out story events, it still acts as a service to the turn-based battle gameplay. In brutal legend their real-time strategy element acts as a boss fight between arcs. So through the story you carry out all these missions recruiting people/units for your arming whilst learning how to use them. Then when the time comes for the boss fight, you know how to use the units and it’s a matter of deciding how you want to play. Brutal Legend does have a multiplayer/game mode dedicated to the real-time strategy element of their game but uses it sparsely in comparison to their adventure side. It does a very good job of immersing the player and distracting the player from the distinction and switching between game modes by giving context and not removing them from the player’s current setting.
One of my goals is to have something immersive that could transition into the tower defense game mode on a moderate basis. This includes creating an adventure side that still contributes to strategy elements even outside of the tower-defense gameplay.
Next on my list, I’ll be jumping onto creating some more enemies. Now that I’ve got some basic enemy types, I can explore some uniquer enemies that should hopefully cause some disruption to the flow. These should hopefully pop up in the next post. 😀
That’s all for now mateysss.
