New TD - Dimensia Defense

Wait, don't pounce! It won't be your regular TD, and it will be varied.

First, I want to say what my TD implements.

There will be 50 levels... exponentially getting harder. The last level alone is 13% of all the previous levels combined. 64k hp per unit I think.

There will be 4 races, Human, Elvan, Netherworld, Insectoid. Each race will have distinct specialties. Humans for example are (as always) in the middle. Insectoid towers will have special abilities etc.

I'm going to make upgrades for at least 2/3 of the towers. Upgrades as in research that improves or adds abilities.

The name will be Dimensia Defense, not really much of a plot your typical defending against forces of evil. But you don't play TDs for plot, or if you do you are confused.

There will be varied "Ages" for each race, actually... scratch that. Human and Elvan will go by ages, as in you start with a builder that can only build really crappy towers and you upgrade your age center... Your builder is automatically replaced so no worrying about that. Netherworld will be a classic morph tower setup, where each tower has 1-3 upgrades (actually changes the tower) which will change the way each tower works. You must have had a tower of [level] before you can have [tower]. Insectoid will require you research, or evolve abilities before utilizing them in towers. There will be about 15 towers in Insectoid but specialties will work differently. Most researches will apply to all your towers, but especially to the type that "evolves" it. So you have wall towers that can evolve increased strength, but they will always remain stronger than all the others.

The next, is the armies. I can't really think of a better word for it, but essentially you recruit armies. You build something at your age center, or some method I haven't worked out yet for Insectoid and Netherworld, and at the beginning of the next level units spawn fighting for you.

Lastly, in order to increase difficulty I am just using movement speed as the difficulty modifier. Units will use a "Smart Navigation" system... When Lead Unit reaches Way-Point 1, all other WPs become oriented to WP 2. So that if a unit from the same group of units hits any of those WPs, they will be directed to the correct one. And so on. When I played the TD, the number of turns in the WPs caused units to become very stretched out. To prevent this, units will have a group mentality, and play follow the leader, often times when a turn is presented you will see several units suddenly change direction to go to the correct WP. Even lagging units will often react due to the chain-reaction of group selection and what-not. The turns I implemented are also designed to reduce the stretching... by putting turns in 180 degree implements that allow a unit to simply go from one side to the other.

I do plan on making this extremely difficult!

Another thing I plan on is making it so that certain towers provide buffs to nearby units... these towers would be expensive command post like towers.

I don't expect people to win this one their first time through, or even second. Especially not on Very Hard. Difficulty is set in unit speed and goes something like this: 230 - 260 - 290 - 330 - 425 from Very easy to Very Hard. The "group mentality" that I forced into the navigation system makes it extremely difficult on Very Hard.

One thing I am debating: making towers cost an amount of food to dictate the maximum # of towers you can have or support, making it a seperate construction, or ignoring tower # limits altogether.


Edit: Oh, and I plan on eventually, after I get done with all the units and everything, making it so that there are three modes. Individual teams of one-two players (4 teams). A global team mode (slightly increased lives due to difficulty) and a war mode.

The war mode would make it so that if you succesfully beat a level and your Army still stands, it will, instead of disappearing near where the monsters spawn, continue on and actually attack towers of players clockwise and counter clockwise. Of course... the other players might have their own just-victorious army. Heh.

Sorry to bump but I'm adding some more info on what this will be.

Modes:

Global Team ~ All players allied, 64 lives total.
4 Team Challenge ~ 4 teams of 1-2 players, 48 lives per team.
Two Team War ~ Two teams of 1-4 players.. Teams are kitty-corner one another.

Quasi-Unique features of this TD:

• I'm dead set on making every tower have some sort of upgrade, if not, an ability or advantage or unique "place"
• There will be four huge races, rather than a Wintermaul-esque setup of many small races. Each race will have about 20 towers, over 15 upgrade/ability towers, and about 18 spawnable armies.
• Armies, as far as I know, will be completely unique to this TD. Most TDs focus on towers. Duh. Well, the best part of a melee match, other than winning, is the battles that occur. Seeing units clash and do battle is just plain cool looking. So each race will have many army types that they can spawn at the beginning of the round to assist them.
• A war mode which combines the TD itself, and spawnable units. To compensate and make it so that the Monsters and Armies take roughly equal importance, I will make it so that upon killing the monsters in your area, the Army units HP will multiply by some rediculous number. Why? Army units wont be that strong, the best army unit will be only 1/5th of the last level... But to make the same "weak" army units a threat to other players, they will become very strong. Making them deadlier and more menacing than the monsters... seeing as how they will destroy your towers. Such as 10x hp... so from 16,000 to 160,000.

In order to balance my TD, I have precalculated each level's HP.

Let's see. What else is there..

Oh yeah, really big screenshots. I completely forgot.

http://aaron.frieltek.com/dimdef01.jpg
http://aaron.frieltek.com/dimdef02.jpg
http://aaron.frieltek.com/dimdef03.jpg
http://aaron.frieltek.com/dimdef04.jpg
http://aaron.frieltek.com/dimdef05.jpg

Uhm, I don't think I'm missing anything.

Famous last words...

Hey, you could evaluate whether or not you think it will be. You could provide advice.

Perhaps you dont understand how much work I am putting into this. And, given a good idea, I will use it. I am not one of those people who refuses to change.

Edit: And they said creativity wasn't possible in a TD... hmph.

http://aaron.frieltek.com/dimdef06.jpg
http://aaron.frieltek.com/dimdef07.jpg
http://aaron.frieltek.com/dimdef08.jpg (Thats a lot of cliff walls, huh?)

Hey gearhead, when do you plan to have a beta version? And when you do, do you need testers? If so, I'll be glad to help.

I wont need a beta version, I meticulously test everything. I scarcely write half a trigger before I test it.

The only part that would need testers is the multiplayer functions. And the triggers for writing each game mode (and making each game mode playable for 1-8 players) will be absolute hell.

I'll need to use lots of player detection and sorting to manage who goes to which spot... Lots of other stuff like that.

The two things I'm working on now are terrain and triggers. I've only done about half the Human race buildings and 6 levels of the monsters, purely for testing. Right now all my towers have upgrades, except walls and the most recently made towers.

Magical_Snail, have you ever used a doodad as a tower? The reason I ask is because I have found quite a few good doodads, however their death animation is a steady nothing for a good ten seconds then they magically disappear. I had been using a Flame Grate (the circular one) for a Nuclear Silo but I was so pissed at it not disappearing upon death that I changed it. I really would like to change it back to free up the building (Sacrificial Pit) for the Netherworld.

Just some random things I've played around with (often resulting in crashes)

http://aaron.frieltek.com/dimdefbefore.jpg
http://aaron.frieltek.com/dimdefafter.jpg
http://aaron.frieltek.com/dimdef2before.jpg
http://aaron.frieltek.com/dimdef2after.jpg

Lastly:
http://aaron.frieltek.com/dimdef3before.jpg
http://aaron.frieltek.com/dimdef3after.jpg

No, that is not a flat line extending to infinity. That is a three dimensional figure extending to infinity. Actually, its really just two dimensional because the sides of it are lines... repeating lines. I don't know, its a creepy effect I produced.

I have never used a doodad as a tower before, but I think you can fix your problem. If you got to the object editor, go to units, there's a thing called Art - Death Time (seconds). If you change that, then the unit will take longer to die or shorter. You might not get a nice looking death animation for a doodad, but at least you'll get a short one.

That didn't work for me, at all. As far as I can tell death time is irrelevant because the unit will still go through its entire death animation. I think death time has to deal with the amount of time it takes to either build in that area again, or to get rid of the ground texture. I could be wrong, but I remember death time being ineffective at fixing this.

There are quite a few good Obelisk type doodads, but unless they look good I wont use them.

Hmm... well i'm sure you can change it.. but I can't help you past that :p

looks like a standard run of the mill TD to me.

i like TD neway. u carnt really get nethin other then a standard TD rly unless u add mini games and way of gettin towers like the Poker TD.

kool terraining btw only problem is were it stretchs unless it doesnt stretch ingame.

I think that the only way to get rid of doodad models after the unit or building with the model is destroyed is to have a trigger that says: Events: A unit dies; Conditions: Unit-type of dying unit equal to YourDoodadTower; Actions: Remove dying unit. With some additional SFX in your trigger, you could make some sort of death "animation" like explosions or whatever to cover up the fact that the building then simply dissapears.

Hm, run of the mill.

Consider the fact that I dont expect people to beat it un-run of the mill.

Run of the mill? Are you kidding? Just by the info and screenshots alone I can already tell this map is FAR more unique and interesting than 80% of the crappy TDs out there today. Even if a TD doesn't have completely new features, mini games, or what ever, it's never a bad thing to have a nice, solid TD.

And terrain.

http://aaron.frieltek.com/dimdeffort1.jpg

I just oh-so-know that people will be too busy staring at the beautiful terrain to do any mazing. That's my secret.