Making of a Tower Defense

Right now I’m between two jobs which gives me a week of creative coding, oh yeah! As I said in an earlier post I wanted to create a tower defense game, then I got sidetracked and made “Shadowess” instead, which was a lot of fun and created some of the foundations for this game.

I want to create a sandbox Tower Defense game instead of a linear. Here are two key features I am adding:

1) Physics. Shoot creeps with big canons and knock them off their path, even make them fall of the map.

2) Behaviors. Creeps can posses different behaviors. So far I’ve implemented a behavior to avoid incoming artillery fire, this looks really cool – shooting into a group scatters it as they are fleeing all over. Another behavior is to avoid towers by taking advantage of a weighted graph they can find their way to the goal exposing themselves to as little danger as possible. More to come.

Also I created a little level editor in which I can draw maps using a hexagonal layout. I will not spend so much time on graphics instead focus on the game play. Your objective is to protect your “souls” which the creeps try to steal. I’ve a story line for this in the back of  my head as well, but that’s for the future.

Here is a first screenshot to show you the progress. This level has allows 2 types of towers, a normal canon and a slow tower, creeps enter at the bottom right and exits in the top. I’ve built a windy path for them to follow.