(1) Tower Defense Tycoon

Business Plan:
Step 1) Build Towers
Step 2) ?????
Step 3) Profit!

Welcome to Tower Defense Tycoon, a single-player tower defense adventure! You are in control of a Tower Defense theme park where spectators pay big money to see your towers mutilate defenseless creeps. Build bigger and badder towers to attract more spectators to your park, crank up admission rates to earn more money, and score bloody kills to make the crowd go wild! Meanwhile you can build special facilities such as hotels, family restaurants, bus stations, and bathroom facilities to improve your park.

Each day your spectators will pay the admission rate to enter your park, and each night you will put on tower defense shows with increasing difficulty. Plan your strategy well, because leaking units from your tower defense maze will make your spectators lose interest and your park rating will go down. Upgrade special abilities for your towers and research advanced technologies to prevent your park from going out of business.

Map Features:
The game offers 50 levels-- survive all 50 shows and retire with loads of money.

Five mini-boss levels (special events) and five boss levels (main events). Boss levels are fully scripted levels where you will see unique challenges that you haven't seen in any other tower defense game.

Units with special abilities will give you a run for your money. Enemies can stun or disable your towers, blink, heal, drop wards, and much more.

12 types of attack towers, and 6 support towers. Each type of tower has been carefully designed and balanced to have a unique role in the game. Figure out the best way to use each type of tower to optimize your defense.

Many of the towers have new and unusual effects.
Blood Tower - Becomes permanently more powerful with each killing blow it makes.
Kraken Tower - Teleports between two different locations, it's like two towers in one!
Burnout Tower - This tower can be overclocked to provide incredible burst damage for several seconds, but the tower will overheat and become unusable for several days.
Solar-Powered Cannon - Powers up before each show and loses power with each attack, it's most effective when it attacks infrequently. An excellent tower for occasional leaks.

Each tower has a unique technology bonus that improves it in some way. You can give your towers bouncing attacks, add freezing effects, or even gain the ability to relocate your towers to new positions. Your research is limited, so you must carefully choose which towers you upgrade.

Every 10 levels you get to choose one of several upgrade effects that allow you to fine-tune your strategy with your favorite towers. Whether you want to maximize the money you earn, focus on crowd control, or improve your survivability, there's an upgrade effect for your strategy.

The game has characters, scripted events, a pseudo-story, and a TON of surprises. Good luck, tycoons!


Screenshots!

Hidden information: Collect admission each day and receive bonuses for your park facilities Shown here is the Hotel, which allows spectators to stay overnight. Upgrade to a Resort to retain even more spectators!

Hidden information: Pass your park inspection to become a fully certified theme park!

Hidden information: Watch out-- some units can stun your towers

Hidden information: WOULD SOMEBODY PLEASE HELP THE BABY SEALS?! Looks like the baby seals didn't make it :(

Hidden information: A pyrotechnics display is set off to rally the crowd

Hidden information: Special events provide a fresh experience to even the most seasoned tower defense players

Map Progress:
Complete! Please let me know if you have any suggestions or find any bugs.

Enjoy the game!

-Skrow

EDIT: Added multiple levels of difficulty to the game.

Just gonna spit these out as I see 'em:

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"What is a schemtic" typo in the info button.

Camera work is excellent.
Time of day finesse is a very good piece of polish.
Having a cohort goblin that puts a style behind the game text is really engaging.

Watching him auto-spend all your hard-earned cash is funny!

More lighting or making the night less dark would be good. I like the "feel" of dark but in reality I want to see the baddies pretty clearly. Maybe just a nice even blue cast to everything.

The Rat King with the Inner Fire buff was a nice touch.

I'm thinking the terrain is well-made, but I'm not feelin' the Outlands tile set, ya know? Something more park-like seems appropriate.

Towers with missile indicators above them is a nice idea.

Make Passive ability icons look like Passive icons with the shaded border. I can help you figure out how to do this if you want, and it makes a world of difference. I really loath active-looking buttons that aren't clickable.

Park Inspection was fun... I'm not sure I've ever felt the need to perform to someone's expectations in a TD before :P

I believe critical strike chance defaults to the nearest 5%; unless you're triggering critical hits your crit abilities probably aren't working quite the way they say they are.

I'm selfish, I admit. I would like to see a spectator unit for each spectator my park is supposed to have. Maybe you could make more areas for spectators so they can just flood in. That would be satisfying.

What exactly determines impressive and spectacular kills?

Super Temporal Reducer didn't have Slow on autocast by default.

Since we're supposed to be gibbing "bad guys", shouldn't their names make then sound a little more... bad? For example, "archer" isn't saying much. But maybe "anarchist archer" is moving in the right direction?

Night 18 was hilarious! I won't spoil it for anybody.

I love your damage types, especially Science!

Your "supply error" message is still the default "Build more burrows...". That's easy to change in the Interface menu.

Now that I looked, your gold and lumber descriptions (when you hover over the gold and lumber counters) are also default. Also easy to change.

A suggestion to consider: you may wish to make the $ icons something besides green, since on a small icon that can be mistaken at a glance for lumber. I know I did that a few times during my game.

"Aggrivated Assault" typo.

Interesting to adjust difficulty mid-way. What are your thoughts about this?

Crowd rally was pretty fun!

Master of Fire's demolitions was really well-executed. Good job!

It took the zeppelin a *long* time to pick up all the pennies; I was waiting several minutes to get that upgrade manual, just sitting right there.


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At about night 37 I had to leave for work, which is why this isn't very organized. Still, make of it what you will. All in all, excellent work!

I just got home from vacation (PAX East, hell yea) to see my favorite thing-- constructive feedback!

This feedback is incredibly helpful by the way. Thank you!

I'll fix up those typos and other minor bugs.


I agree with you here, how do you do this?


When I started working on this map, I never planned to go past level 15, I just wanted practice making a tower defense map. Using the Outland tileset is my greatest regret and I really don't like it myself. Unfortunately I have not found a reliable way to change the tileset to something more park-y.


I would love to know how this can be done. I'll send you a PM about it.


I didn't know that, but it sounds likely from what I know about the editor's inner workings. I don't think it makes much difference in long-term DPS.


I would like to see this too, but I'm not convinced that WC3 can handle it. You get 1 spectator unit for each 5 spectators right now. By the end of the game you could have over 1000 spectators, and that's a lot of units. I have found that unit wandering breaks when there's a lot of units and they will cluster together in one spot.


I have a note on this at the Information Kiosk. Each tower has a 10% chance to score an impressive kill and a 1% chance to score a spectacular kill, so it's all random. Since spectacular kills are so important, the game has a "luck threshold" so if you don't have enough spectacular kills the game will boost the chance for them to drop until you are at the minimum threshold.


The slow effect is all trigger-based, the ability is not autocast. I could alleviate this by making the icon look passive, but I still couldn't remove the yellow borders on the icon.


Thanks for the suggestion, I'll follow this naming paradigm more closely when I remake the game in SC2.


My dream is that one day we can come together and spread the word to all map developers that air levels completely suck.


lol


I have a lot of interface text and audio customizations, but I have learned at they only take effect if you are Human. I will fix this by forcing the player to be Human.


My free trial of Photoshop just expired, but I will keep this thought in mind when I remake the game in SC2 (and steal Photoshop ).



This was entirely my wife's idea to have the mid-way difficulty option, but I really like it. If you wanted to be cool and do it on Normal the first time, but then found out that you were leaking too much, you could switch it to Easy and still maybe finish the game. Since this is a single player game, I don't expect very may people to try it more than once if they fail partway through, and I want as many people to be able to enjoy the game to the end. There's lots of surprises towards the end of the game that I don't want players to miss.


I'll fix this one. It will be easy to auto-grab nearby pennies when one is taken, but other types-- wood, admission tokens, upgrade books-- would be more difficult.


I think I'm going to make the day-time cycles shorter as you progress through the game so it doesn't take so long.

Thanks for the help!

Re: tileset. So, if you adjust the tileset now, it'll replace the existing tileset with whatever one you want. Even a custom tileset. You'll have to redo your tree walls, but eh, that's not so bad. Backup your map before you try that out; there's no undo.

Re: crit strike. I don't remember the name of the tower, but one of them has a crit strike % equal to its number of kills. That's a little misleading if it only actually updates every 5%.

Re: spectators. You make a good point. Pity.

Re: adjustable difficulty. Bravo, good call. Fun, after all, is the point.

Re: PM. I replied.

EDIT: Re: spectacular kills. I wish they were dependent on overkill or something, but I recognize that's difficult if not impossible.

Keep up the good work!