Ruins Tower Defense

Ruins Tower Defense - Pre-Alpha (no public release yet)
By Ammorth




Backstory:
Deep within the jungles of our world stands a long forgotten, ruined temple. The temple is home to many secrets and treasures, guarded by the ruined guardians. Man, in his search for glory and wealth, came across the temple and its guardians. There, they set up camp and spent months deciphering the runes and puzzles, powering the seal that kept the ruins closed. The guardians pleaded with man, warning him of the evils that lurked within, but man believed it to be a test of courage. When the seal broke free, a thundering roar, originating deep within the ruins, could be heard. The evils felt the seal shatter and began ascending from the depth, in an attempt to escape and wreck havoc across the lands.

Creatures and beings from all corners of our world came to the aid of the ruined guardians. Together, in a final stand, they will attempt to keep the evils at bay until the guardians can re-forge the seal. It is do or die; there are no second chances. Fight valiantly and succeed, or fall short and watch the world crumble.


Map Description:
Fight of waves of evils from the ruins, as they attempt to escape. Use one of 11 races, over 100 unique towers and 11 different heros to defend your world. Evils that escape through your defenses are cleaned up by your heros, assuming your heroes arn't weak from previous waves.




Map Features:

• 11 Races, each with their own unique hero
• Over 100 unique towers
• 40 waves of evil
• Plays as a Maul or East vs West
• 3 Difficulty Settings
• Support for bot hosting using HCL by Strilanc

Race Previews Ruined Guardians: Protectors of the ruined temple, the Ruined Guardians provide support to all who defend against the ruin. They specialize in brute force with some magical properties. Stone Thrower Throws stones at enemies, dealing low damage. Upgrades to Corrupted Hurler. Damage: 34-38 Range: 800 Attack Speed: 1.4 Attacks land and air units. Corrupted Hurler The corrupted waters have strengthened the Stone Thrower, giving it a chance to stun its target with its attack. Damage: 120-134 Range: 800 Attack Speed: 1.2 10% chance to stun target for 1 second Attacks land and air units. Ruined Smasher The guardian's powerful melee swings smash nearby enemy units with seige damage. Upgrades to Ruined Shatterer. Damage: 82-96 Range: Melee Attack Speed: 0.9 Attacks only land units. Ruined Shatterer Grown in size and strength from the corrupted waters, the Ruined Shatterer has a chance to crack enemy skulls, causing a significant increase in damage. Damage: 130-152 Range: Melee Attack Speed: 0.9 10% to crack an enemies skull, doing 3 times normal damage. Attacks only land units. Mystical Shrine The Mystical Shrine of the ruined ancients blasts units with moderate shock damage. Upgrades to worshiped shrine. Damage: 115-124 Range: 900 Attack Speed: 1.0 Attacks land and air units. Worshipped Shrine Worshippers have empowered the shrine, giving it the ability to bless it's people. Increases the attack rate of nearby building. Damage: 138-162 Range: 900 Attack Speed: 1.0 Increases the attack speed of nearby towers by 20%. (400 range) Attacks land and air units. Ancient Hydra The Ancient Hydra has three heads, attacking three targets simultaneously. Damage: 214-264 Range: 1000 Attack Speed: 1.5 Attacks up to 3 targets at the same time. Attacks land and air units. Please keep in mind, all the values and even the towers themselves could change if I don't like something/for balance.

Screenshots:



Progress:

• Coding - |||||||||| 80%
• Terrain - |||||||||| 99%
• Races - |||||||||| 10%
• Waves - |||||||||| 10%
• Balance - |||||||||| 0%

The majority of work left is Object Editor based (my least favourite). That being said, it should progress rather quickly. Balancing will be the toughest part. I will most likely come out with an Alpha map so many people can play and report balance issues and suggestions.


Notes:
Having played many mediocure tower defenses on battle.net, I've decided to create my own. Many of the features (both big and small) I have enjoyed from other TDs, I have tried to include into Ruins TD. My hope is to create a TD, myself and others can enjoy.

I'd like to see some screenshots.

I will post some once I get enough of the waves/races setup so that I have some actual gameplay.

Neat! I know you're still working on it, but upload something for us to test! :P

Once I have something that resembles a workable game, and not just a bunch of code doing stuff (I need units!), I'll post something up here.

On another note, I have uploaded a couple of screenshots. In one of the shots, you can see some faded trees. I was experimenting with them, as I was finding it was difficult for some bases to see the limits of their zone. I have since decided to allow the players to rotate the game camera (you can see the button on the builder). I havn't gotten around to changing the trees back, but I should now that I remember.

A few things that I havn't implemented yet are the heros and the research center (to upgrade towers and heros). The heros will not actually be part of the tower defense part, but after, to clean up "leaks". The idea is that any units you "leak" will end up at your heros, where you have to kill them to beat the level. If all the heros die, you loose. My thought on how this system will affect game-play is that I can make the waves more difficult than normal, anticipating a few units get past every level. Minor leaks will not hurt your team at all, as heros will have no problems dispatching them. However, constant moderate leakage or one major leakage could cost you the game. This way, if you have a tower that maybe just doesn't like attacking the lowest health units (and you leak a lot of 10% hp units), you won't loose.

Therefore, I will change lives to the average hero health of your team. When the average hits 0, you loose. Heros will regen health and some will have minor healing abilities to slowly raise your average health.

Looks promising. I'll keep an eye on this.

A few things you could care of:
Make it unique! Add random events, random creep changers (abilities, effects, buffs, auras, upgrades)
Make it replayable! For that make it hard, balanced (Yeah I know, kinda hard) and fast but long-time based.

I agree. Its not going to be like Skibi TD, the theme is supposed to be more serious. I could try brainstorm some random events that would fit within the "story", maybe you could help with that?

As replay-ability, I plan to balance it so anyone can play and beat it on easy (but not so easy that you get bored). Normal will be for the more advanced players (since this is what the map will be geared mainly toward). Hard will be near-impossible, requiring the perfect combination of hero and tower strength.

Balancing is going to be huge for me. Down to each tower; trying to get them to mesh nicely. As well as waves; not having 6 waves that you walk through, and then one that walks through you instead. It will also be tough, as I will have to balance waves, towers, gold, heros and researches. Therefore, I will need to play it many times with people to try find the perfect mix. Of course, once I get playable stuff, I'll post some pre-alpha maps here, so people can try them out and give preliminary feed back while I work on other aspects.

There was something else I wanted to say, but now my mind draws a blank... hmm, ill edit if I remember.

I have another idea: if you leak more then half of the wave units, their get worse for a limited amount of waves. Maybe next wave: -20% hp, 2nd: -10%, 3rd: -5% and 4th is normal again. That will make it fair because you didn't earn the money.

About the random stuff:
Storm, rain, random creep bosses and random towers increase game experience alot.

About balancing:
Its kinda hard, but I took 200 hours for my footman frenzy map to balance it xD. Its worth it, really.

I don't really like this approach, since I would like the game to be challenging. Plus, with the heros at the end, I think it is already forgiving enough.


Im still toying with some sort of between wave thing with heros. Like if you kill your entire wave, units will spawn that you can kill for some nice items or something. As for random towers, I'm not really sure how to do that... cause I don't plan nor want to have a random tower race. there is a random race selection though, for those who want to try out something but arn't sure what.


Ya, I definately will not be looking forward to it, but I keep reminding myself of the finished product (in my mind) and it keeps pushing me forward.

Aswell, I should be adding the first complete race (minus possible tweaks), to the top page.

Well, was just an idea :)

Random towers mean towers that have random abilities for example :P

Hehe, thats always good.

Just do it! :)

I've been doing some TD balancing for the last few weeks and my advice for balancing would be to do it in chunks.

Get the units created in the object editor for the first 10 levels or so and use your best guess on HP/armor/speed etc. Play through those 10 levels a few times and try out different strategies. You should either balance the game on the highest difficulty and play perfectly, or play it on normal and manufacture some imperfection into your strategy.

When you have your first 10 levels balanced relative to each other, you can then balance your towers/races against one another. Balance is all relative, so once you have one aspect of the game balanced, then everything else will fall into place.

After 10 levels, you should carefully document how much money/resources you had at the end and set yourself up to start at level 11 with all the resources you had and begin balancing 11-20, and beyond.

Thanks for the input! I will need a few people to help balance it with, as I would like the game to be balanced as if it was played with a full team. If you want to help with that, I would be really greatful (that goes to anyone for that matter).

My first plan is to get 4-5 races all setup in the editor and triggers as well as the first 10-20 waves. Once I can balance the first races with the waves, I have a feeling designing the rest of the races will be a lot easier (I will know what will make something too powerful and what wont).

I am also taking ideas on how the heros work. I would like to be able to reward players with items for their heros for doing well. I will most likely allow the team to summon a boss during a wave. The boss will move with the creeps and be based on the current wave. If you kill the boss during the wave, you gain a bonus aswell. Otherwise, the boss and any of the surviving creeps will battle with your heros at the end. When the boss dies, he has a chance of dropping some items, rarity depending on the level he was summoned. This adds some complexity in that you can do it on an easier level, but you won't get as good of items. If you do it on a harder level though, you may not have the defenses to kill enough and your heros are over-run. Its sort of a risk you have to take to become more powerful in the future. What do you guys think about this?

I was planning on allowing rare items to be saved using a code, that way, if you keep playing with the same people, you can aquire some nice loot off of the more difficult bosses, progressing you through difficulties. I could then balance the game in that hard difficulty is near-impossible without some rare items.

As well, here is a little preview of the score system. Instead of getting gold per kill, you get a lump of gold at the end of every level, depending on your score for that level. You get score by damaging the creeps. Therefore, you don't have to kill a creep to get gold, just deal it damage. This works nicely as some races may not have the brute power to kill a unit entirely, but focus more on slowly killing units or softenning them up for the next guy. This also removes the frustration of killing all your creeps to 30% hp and not getting rewarded for any of it.

Any ideas or suggestions?

Updates!

I have since changed the gold system. Instead of getting one lump sum at the end of the level, you will now get gold based on your score during the level. When you deal damage to all creeps equal to the life of one creep, you get the spcified bounty for that 1 creep worth of damage. This approach is more like how tower defenses usually work and still gives you that expected gold during the level to either give to the last defender on harder levels or expand your maze as units move through it.

As well, I have finally finished coding an anti-block system. It will automatically check for blocks in the maze and restrict building placement if it were to block. Right now, it works as expected but I have found a possible exploit that will need to be addressed.

I uploaded a video to youtube featuring the anti-block system. You can view it here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJ_Wr_iwGcg

Great one, I guess you save all tower positions and check whether they have a valid range for creeps to atleast one side? :D