I’m planning to make a Tower Defense game. It’s going to be in 3D, and the unique feature of it will be that the player can actually be INSIDE the tower. One of the towers will be an infantry tower, so there will be soldiers inside with upgradeable weapons and such, and the player can actually switch between individual ones, and shoot at the enemies in range. The user will also be able to play in standard mode, where he will be placing the towers, but not be able to control any individual characters. Another option would be both, where the player will be able to switch between Normal Mode and Soldier Mode instantly. My question is, what are some major components of a Tower Defense game, or maybe some specific things that make the game a Tower Defense game. Here are the major components I’ve thought of so far:
1. Towers
2. Upgrades
3. Money System
4. Reward System
5. Scoring System
6. Increasingly Difficult Enemies
7. Grid to place Towers
8. Campaign/Missions (Optional)
9. Multiple Modes
Is there anything I’m missing? Are there any specific components I need to worry about. Is there something that makes the game a Tower Defense game, all though it’s not visible to the player? If not, are there things I need to leave out? Help would be useful.
Best practice:
Go play several Tower Defense games, make notes of what they do against your list. See if there’s any core features you want/missed. Alter list.
That has been done already and I can’t seem to find one. So the question is more:
Are there underlying, or hidden, factors that make a Tower Defense that a player may not actually see?
point 0 is missing: play play play play
TDs can’t be planned as that, they need extensive testing to find a difficulty and challange level. If you don’t plan in dozens to hundreds of hours playtesting among you and a group of testers, it does not stand a chance to be ‘interesting’
and nope there is no hidden thing as TD is a strategy subtype and strategy means that you can get the relevant information. But there are implicit things that less dedicated players may miss especially on cross grade upgrade trees or tower synergies especially if you have ice, poison or booster/aura towers
So a major part of Tower Defense games is taking complicated things, such as mixed/cross grade towers, and making as simple as possible. I was also wondering about graphics. I was thinking the graphics would have to be downgraded from any other platform, due to the sheer space it would take up. But then I saw the screenshots for ShadowGun by MadFinger on the website, and the graphics are amazing considering it’s for iPhone. It looks console quality. How would I achieve this quality? I figured it would take an amazing amount of optimization on the 3D Modelers part, and Unity would actually need insane optimization too. Other than that, are there other ways to achieve that kind of graphics (besides great modeling) and just pure optimization?
One optimization technique is actually not doing anything complicated model-wise, and instead have great textures that make it look realistic. For example, I noticed the wheels on the artillery in Tom Clancy’s Endwar, where actual just cylinders, with a texture of the side of the wheel on it (not the tire). So there were no actual indents on the wheel frame, just one solid cylinder and the wheel frames. Being a Tower Defense game, the camera won’t usually take in such detail. One thing though, is the mode where the player actually gets to play as one of the soldiers in the towers. That would complicate things a bit, since now that the player is now in a FPS view, the towers and the enemies themselves would need to have more detail, which would slow down performance a lot. Since this is going to be for mobile platforms, the file size has to be small, and everything would need insane optimization. This is why I’m considering removing the idea of the player actually getting a FPS look and play as a soldier, because I don’t think it’s possible with the kind of phone technology we currently have.
I tell you what not to do,its more about game-design than anything else. The oldschool method of learn by dying/failure does not sit with casual gamers. What you should is introduce new concepts gradually, for example if you didnt know you had to build a laser tower after round 5 because the monsters get “hats” its really going to screw up the game.
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/id447736564?ls=1&mt=8