30 upgrades that only change the damage, splash + siege, completely imbalanced must-have towers, endless waves of streaming mobs that do absolutely nothing.
Oh, but wait, that sums up most of the TDs right there. Thankfully, there are good ones as well.
I was actually considering making a TD centered around situational awareness. I'm still fleshing out the concept, though.
@Unabsurdity: Go
Do people like TD's with mini games between rounds (such as hero-creeping). Or do people prefer to not be bothered by such things.
Do people like the need to micro their towers and their abilities, as well as macro the traits or attributes of their towers? Or is that too much of a hassle?
Do people prefer to be on their toes the entire game in order to win, or do they prefer to sit and relax during the time the mobs run through?
<<quote 103369>>endless waves of streaming mobs that do absolutely nothing.
This is the point. I thought about creating a Tower Defense and had some ability concepts in my head. At the moment i am building an other map, so i am willing to share them.
Overlord: Generates Creep upon death.
Overseer: Casts Corruption, generates creep
Queen: Lays an egg when under 50% health which spawns a zergling after some time
Roach: When under 30% health the roach will burrow, move some times underground and uses it's high regeneration
Zergling: Uses a dash-like ability which increases movementspeed greatly over a short period
Broodlord: Generates two broodlings upon death
I think it would be cool to have this fixed abilities together with some general randomly added like Speed, Armor, whatever comes to your mind.
Do people like the need to micro their towers and their abilities, as well as macro the traits or attributes of their towers? Or is that too much of a hassle?
Sounds like some good points, and sounds like hopefully i'm going the right direction with my own TD map i'm working on. (think a combonation Elmental TD from WC3 and Standard Tower Defense thats out for SC2) I figure i'd check with you guys on something, do you like host options? Besides the straightfoward 'diffculty' addtional options/play types with varations that the host can pick and choose at the start of the map, like for instance how many lives max you have (default 20, but can choose 10, 20, 30, 40 or 50) and how about a 'Do or Die' mode where you only have 1 life to create a real challange? Any thoughts on this?
Both, both and both. There is audience for every place on the difficulty curve, which should be evident by the existence and popularity of both highly competitive and easy maps. Now, what difficulty do the masses prefer - that's a different question. I don't see why that should concern me in any way, though. I'm not looking for profit or worship, but rather to advance my skills and to create the game I would like to play. Everyone is free to direct a map at whatever audience he/she likes.
That said, I did not imply any of what you said with "situational awareness", except the last one. Really, can a game be fun to play without any real engagement? Not that I know of. It doesn't necessarily have to be a gameplay engagement, it can be the storyline, the visual effects, the choreography. I don't see how one can rely purely on those in a TD, though.
Of course, the difficulty cannot be very high, for it would damage the game in a different way. My goal is to provide several difficulty levels - that ideally differ by more than just effective health.
I'm not sure at all which concepts I'll use and which I'll change. I'll post some ideas when I finish brainstorming
Simple idea, just use TD but make 2 teams of players face off each other.
Now it's not a matter of survival, but testing each other's defenses...
Maybe, 2 halves of the map, where the team can build, and players can gain points to send units in a "direction" on roads.
It is up to players to defend the roads from the enemies, so basically, a smart player will try to seek out the weakest defense in their opponent's base.
To make it even more interesting...
Do it like train tracks!
See, on the map, there will be 3 roads leading into a base, and these 3 roads have "forks" in the middle of the map. Players can use their points to "flip" the switches on the forks, causing the mobs to head in a different direction.
Being smart and manipulating the direction into your defenses also means you gain more points to retaliate, and using points to manipulate your opponent's movements.
That's the tower wars concept. There are many of those out there as well. I prefer, however, for the AI to challenge the players for what I have in mind.
Both, both and both. There is audience for every place on the difficulty curve, which should be evident by the existence and popularity of both highly competitive and easy maps. Now, what difficulty do the masses prefer - that's a different question. I don't see why that should concern me in any way, though. I'm not looking for profit or worship, but rather to advance my skills and to create the game I would like to play. Everyone is free to direct a map at whatever audience he/she likes.
That said, I did not imply any of what you said with "situational awareness", except the last one. Really, can a game be fun to play without any real engagement? Not that I know of. It doesn't necessarily have to be a gameplay engagement, it can be the storyline, the visual effects, the choreography. I don't see how one can rely purely on those in a TD, though.
Of course, the difficulty cannot be very high, for it would damage the game in a different way. My goal is to provide several difficulty levels - that ideally differ by more than just effective health.
I'm not sure at all which concepts I'll use and which I'll change. I'll post some ideas when I finish brainstorming
----
Rather than going with hardcore difficulties you find in some places in the world (Japan for example), it is better to get the player more involved and challenge themselves with it.
Implement a high score or something that might be important for the players to strive to do better, not give them tougher mobs.
One idea I think I saw in a old map, was where players can "send mobs" to their defenses to kill, harder but in exchange, gain minerals/resources. This is what I mean by making them involved.
That's the tower wars concept. There are many of those out there as well. I prefer, however, for the AI to challenge the players for what I have in mind.
----
But the problem is, sometimes the AI is a bit too far up the road, and it always sends unit that you're not prepared for, since it checks your base and you can't see "the AI's units".
Something like a Gamble TD might work out though, since the actions aren't from AI functions, but "random" coin flips on clues that might have the unit pop out as:
Coin 1 - Ground
Coin 2 - Mechanical
Coin 3 - Fast
Maybe have players able to spend points to get clues or hints, thus making it challenging if they don't rely on it, but able to save their points for better uses, like defenses.
You misunderstand me. I don't mean the campaign AI, but simply computer driven challenges, PvE, or whatever you decide to call it.
I also don't intend to rely solely on difficulty, not at all. Without intrinsic motivators, what desire would anyone have to beat my map at all? Ideally, the goal will be just within the players' grasp, as that proves to be the most engaging and rewarding difficulty level. Can I achieve it? Of course not, not for all, but I certainly plan with that in mind.
The whole point is, though, to create a TD with content. Story, challenge, motivation, variety, design. Yes, I set the bar very high. I would not be satisfied with my work otherwise.
I'm currently working on a TD where all the creeps are procedurally generated. There are three types of creeps each wave: 32 fodder (ground, normal hp, no special attributes or abilities), 16 specials (one of the following: flyer, cloaked, regen, fast, shielded), and 8 elites (either two of the special attributes, or one plus a unique ability, such as an aura, spawns on death, heals nearby creeps, etc.) Towers are all general purpose but most are particularly effective against certain attributes, such as the fire tower preventing regeneration etc. Because you never know what's coming next it's necessary to build a lot of variety of towers and helps to micro them to mitigate the creep abilities they counter as well.
I also removed tower upgrading. After making a prototype TD with upgrading I realized there was nothing fun or interesting about going from Photon Cannon Level 1 to Photon Cannon Level 2. Instead of upgrading individual towers, I have research upgrades that affect all towers of a particular type - six per tower, arranged in four tiers (2, 2, 1, and 1.) To get a 2nd tier upgrade you need at least 1 other upgrade, to get 3rd tier upgrade you need at least 2 other upgrade (from any tier), etc. The upgrades are varied and range from damage, range, armor penetration, critical strike, or increasing the duration of status effects. Generally the 4th tier upgrade is something a bit more interesting - it might add a status effect to the tower or cause it to do splash damage or let it hit air units. Each upgrade costs one gas, and you get a gas after every round, so it works sort of like a talent tree.
There are also heroes which are something I always preferred in TDs because they give you something to micro during the rounds (although lately I've been making most of their abilities autocast because I don't want it to be too micro intensive.) Heroes have tiered upgrades just like towers, so there's a lot of choice in what to spend your gas on and hard decisions to make. Their damage scales automatically based on the current wave because in the prototype xp gain made it too important to get heroes ASAP because they couldn't catch up fast enough if you got them later on.
One other thing I'm doing a bit differently is that it's not really survival based. Instead it's centered around competing for the high score. There is a survival element but it's tuned pretty loosely and you'll only fail if you fall really far behind. But the main goal is to get the best score possible, competing against the other players in the game as well as your own personal best. There are a bunch of elements geared to make the scoring system more interesting - for example getting a perfect round earns you a double score multiplier in the next round, and you earn extra points for any unspent money and gas at the end of a round, so there's a bit of a tradeoff in that if you can hold off on spending some of your money you can get extra points, but you don't want to risk letting anything get through because not getting the multiplier is a huge loss.
Anyway I've been working on this for the last few weeks and saw this thread on TDs so I thought I'd share.
By the way the prototype version is available here if you want to try it out. It has a lot in common with the version I'm currently working on (most of the same towers, heroes, and abilities, although many work a bit differently) but mechanically speaking its way different and functions much more similarly to what you might considered "standard" for TDs.
Be careful with procedural creep generation. If there isn't enough pattern to each wave, the waves won't be memorable or distinctive. People seem to care about these things. They want to e able to say, "I lost on the dragon level".
I've found upgrades work well when the upgrades are useful. This is the one thing that made me have to be unique with EnderCraft TD is that most creeps only have 1 life, so I couldn't use increased damage as an upgrade. But when you have a bomb tower that shoots a hunter-seeker that can't even catch up with the fastest creep due to moving too slowly and the next upgrade is a missile turret which shoots missiles twice as fast, it becomes a very useful upgrade.
Also, new abilities for towers are good upgrades; such as a tower that drops turrets being upgraded to drop splash bombs as well.
My opinion also (I've played almost every flash TD) is the TDs where all the towers do the same thing: target a creep, attack a creep, target a creep, attack a creep; is just boring.
FBender: liked your ideas about the different creeps having different caveats to them; that would make for a fun TD.
lol, that was the first reply in almost 5 months...
and to not make this post worthless:
Why doesn't anyone create a TD in which the creeps actually attack the towers? make 1 invincible barricade tower for mazing, and then have towers with different attack types/abilities to fight against creeps. This would also encourage building support towers like regeneration towers, armor towers, life steal towers, shielding towers, etc.
Dont put in the color of your tower defence. Such as Black Circle TD and Red Circle TD and Green Circle TD and Blue Circle TD. Also dont copy their triggers and terrain.
The single worst thing to do in a tower defense is make one tower needed. It should be balanced even to the point where the first tower will soften em up or give them a debuff, such as ice towers, so that the next towers can soften em up more. But in most games it's just have 20 of this one tower and you're good, wait you forgot to have 20 of these towers to deal with air units.
I sadly won't give you all my ideas for my work-in-project tower defence, but a few things not to put in a TD is easy to say.
- Upgrading your towers from level 1 to level 20 is easy to make, but also very boring to play.
- Playing throught hundreds of the same waves without any big difficulty is also boring.
- Massing the same 2 towers all throught the game is also very boring.
- Playing tower defenses alone or with few people can also be quite boring.
If you avoid doing the things above, you should have chances of atleast getting an okay result.
I hope this have been a little help for you map makers.
When i get a thread up running with my tower defence, you all can feal free to check it out and maybe get any ideas.
What features in TDs have been done to death to the point that you'd ignore any TD with said features?
3 armored near impossible hp given to units every single turn...
They should start looking for new ways to advance TDs, not upgrade upgrade upgrade your towers to handle them.
Defenses needs to be really adaptable to ALL situations and they all should have attribute damage so players can create a pattern or combo.
30 upgrades that only change the damage, splash + siege, completely imbalanced must-have towers, endless waves of streaming mobs that do absolutely nothing.
Oh, but wait, that sums up most of the TDs right there. Thankfully, there are good ones as well.
I was actually considering making a TD centered around situational awareness. I'm still fleshing out the concept, though.
@Unabsurdity: Go Do people like TD's with mini games between rounds (such as hero-creeping). Or do people prefer to not be bothered by such things.
Do people like the need to micro their towers and their abilities, as well as macro the traits or attributes of their towers? Or is that too much of a hassle?
Do people prefer to be on their toes the entire game in order to win, or do they prefer to sit and relax during the time the mobs run through?
<<quote 103369>>
endless waves of streaming mobs that do absolutely nothing.This is the point. I thought about creating a Tower Defense and had some ability concepts in my head. At the moment i am building an other map, so i am willing to share them.
Overlord: Generates Creep upon death.
Overseer: Casts Corruption, generates creep
Queen: Lays an egg when under 50% health which spawns a zergling after some time
Roach: When under 30% health the roach will burrow, move some times underground and uses it's high regeneration
Zergling: Uses a dash-like ability which increases movementspeed greatly over a short period
Broodlord: Generates two broodlings upon death
I think it would be cool to have this fixed abilities together with some general randomly added like Speed, Armor, whatever comes to your mind.
No. Just Round, Short Building Time, next round
No. Use Autocast/passive abilities mainly
Sit, Relax, Build. Maybe a little bit action by SOME active abilities, but use mainly passives. My opinion, not peoples.
Sounds like some good points, and sounds like hopefully i'm going the right direction with my own TD map i'm working on. (think a combonation Elmental TD from WC3 and Standard Tower Defense thats out for SC2) I figure i'd check with you guys on something, do you like host options? Besides the straightfoward 'diffculty' addtional options/play types with varations that the host can pick and choose at the start of the map, like for instance how many lives max you have (default 20, but can choose 10, 20, 30, 40 or 50) and how about a 'Do or Die' mode where you only have 1 life to create a real challange? Any thoughts on this?
@Vexal: Go
Both, both and both. There is audience for every place on the difficulty curve, which should be evident by the existence and popularity of both highly competitive and easy maps. Now, what difficulty do the masses prefer - that's a different question. I don't see why that should concern me in any way, though. I'm not looking for profit or worship, but rather to advance my skills and to create the game I would like to play. Everyone is free to direct a map at whatever audience he/she likes.
That said, I did not imply any of what you said with "situational awareness", except the last one. Really, can a game be fun to play without any real engagement? Not that I know of. It doesn't necessarily have to be a gameplay engagement, it can be the storyline, the visual effects, the choreography. I don't see how one can rely purely on those in a TD, though.
Of course, the difficulty cannot be very high, for it would damage the game in a different way. My goal is to provide several difficulty levels - that ideally differ by more than just effective health.
I'm not sure at all which concepts I'll use and which I'll change. I'll post some ideas when I finish brainstorming
Make a "TD Versus" map.
Simple idea, just use TD but make 2 teams of players face off each other.
Now it's not a matter of survival, but testing each other's defenses...
Maybe, 2 halves of the map, where the team can build, and players can gain points to send units in a "direction" on roads.
It is up to players to defend the roads from the enemies, so basically, a smart player will try to seek out the weakest defense in their opponent's base.
To make it even more interesting...
Do it like train tracks!
See, on the map, there will be 3 roads leading into a base, and these 3 roads have "forks" in the middle of the map. Players can use their points to "flip" the switches on the forks, causing the mobs to head in a different direction.
Being smart and manipulating the direction into your defenses also means you gain more points to retaliate, and using points to manipulate your opponent's movements.
@dra6o0n: Go
That's the tower wars concept. There are many of those out there as well. I prefer, however, for the AI to challenge the players for what I have in mind.
Quote from Unabsurdity:
@Vexal: Go
Both, both and both. There is audience for every place on the difficulty curve, which should be evident by the existence and popularity of both highly competitive and easy maps. Now, what difficulty do the masses prefer - that's a different question. I don't see why that should concern me in any way, though. I'm not looking for profit or worship, but rather to advance my skills and to create the game I would like to play. Everyone is free to direct a map at whatever audience he/she likes.
That said, I did not imply any of what you said with "situational awareness", except the last one. Really, can a game be fun to play without any real engagement? Not that I know of. It doesn't necessarily have to be a gameplay engagement, it can be the storyline, the visual effects, the choreography. I don't see how one can rely purely on those in a TD, though.
Of course, the difficulty cannot be very high, for it would damage the game in a different way. My goal is to provide several difficulty levels - that ideally differ by more than just effective health.
I'm not sure at all which concepts I'll use and which I'll change. I'll post some ideas when I finish brainstorming
----
Rather than going with hardcore difficulties you find in some places in the world (Japan for example), it is better to get the player more involved and challenge themselves with it.
Implement a high score or something that might be important for the players to strive to do better, not give them tougher mobs.
One idea I think I saw in a old map, was where players can "send mobs" to their defenses to kill, harder but in exchange, gain minerals/resources. This is what I mean by making them involved.
Quote from Unabsurdity:
@dra6o0n: Go
That's the tower wars concept. There are many of those out there as well. I prefer, however, for the AI to challenge the players for what I have in mind.
----
But the problem is, sometimes the AI is a bit too far up the road, and it always sends unit that you're not prepared for, since it checks your base and you can't see "the AI's units".
Something like a Gamble TD might work out though, since the actions aren't from AI functions, but "random" coin flips on clues that might have the unit pop out as:
Coin 1 - Ground
Coin 2 - Mechanical
Coin 3 - Fast
Maybe have players able to spend points to get clues or hints, thus making it challenging if they don't rely on it, but able to save their points for better uses, like defenses.
You misunderstand me. I don't mean the campaign AI, but simply computer driven challenges, PvE, or whatever you decide to call it.
I also don't intend to rely solely on difficulty, not at all. Without intrinsic motivators, what desire would anyone have to beat my map at all? Ideally, the goal will be just within the players' grasp, as that proves to be the most engaging and rewarding difficulty level. Can I achieve it? Of course not, not for all, but I certainly plan with that in mind.
The whole point is, though, to create a TD with content. Story, challenge, motivation, variety, design. Yes, I set the bar very high. I would not be satisfied with my work otherwise.
I'm currently working on a TD where all the creeps are procedurally generated. There are three types of creeps each wave: 32 fodder (ground, normal hp, no special attributes or abilities), 16 specials (one of the following: flyer, cloaked, regen, fast, shielded), and 8 elites (either two of the special attributes, or one plus a unique ability, such as an aura, spawns on death, heals nearby creeps, etc.) Towers are all general purpose but most are particularly effective against certain attributes, such as the fire tower preventing regeneration etc. Because you never know what's coming next it's necessary to build a lot of variety of towers and helps to micro them to mitigate the creep abilities they counter as well.
I also removed tower upgrading. After making a prototype TD with upgrading I realized there was nothing fun or interesting about going from Photon Cannon Level 1 to Photon Cannon Level 2. Instead of upgrading individual towers, I have research upgrades that affect all towers of a particular type - six per tower, arranged in four tiers (2, 2, 1, and 1.) To get a 2nd tier upgrade you need at least 1 other upgrade, to get 3rd tier upgrade you need at least 2 other upgrade (from any tier), etc. The upgrades are varied and range from damage, range, armor penetration, critical strike, or increasing the duration of status effects. Generally the 4th tier upgrade is something a bit more interesting - it might add a status effect to the tower or cause it to do splash damage or let it hit air units. Each upgrade costs one gas, and you get a gas after every round, so it works sort of like a talent tree.
There are also heroes which are something I always preferred in TDs because they give you something to micro during the rounds (although lately I've been making most of their abilities autocast because I don't want it to be too micro intensive.) Heroes have tiered upgrades just like towers, so there's a lot of choice in what to spend your gas on and hard decisions to make. Their damage scales automatically based on the current wave because in the prototype xp gain made it too important to get heroes ASAP because they couldn't catch up fast enough if you got them later on.
One other thing I'm doing a bit differently is that it's not really survival based. Instead it's centered around competing for the high score. There is a survival element but it's tuned pretty loosely and you'll only fail if you fall really far behind. But the main goal is to get the best score possible, competing against the other players in the game as well as your own personal best. There are a bunch of elements geared to make the scoring system more interesting - for example getting a perfect round earns you a double score multiplier in the next round, and you earn extra points for any unspent money and gas at the end of a round, so there's a bit of a tradeoff in that if you can hold off on spending some of your money you can get extra points, but you don't want to risk letting anything get through because not getting the multiplier is a huge loss.
Anyway I've been working on this for the last few weeks and saw this thread on TDs so I thought I'd share.
By the way the prototype version is available here if you want to try it out. It has a lot in common with the version I'm currently working on (most of the same towers, heroes, and abilities, although many work a bit differently) but mechanically speaking its way different and functions much more similarly to what you might considered "standard" for TDs.
http://www.sc2mapster.com/maps/rileys-tower-defense/
@RileyStarcraft: Go
What do you mean by the units are generated procedurally? Are their properties dependent on certain variables? Or do they come with random variations?
@RileyStarcraft: Go
Be careful with procedural creep generation. If there isn't enough pattern to each wave, the waves won't be memorable or distinctive. People seem to care about these things. They want to e able to say, "I lost on the dragon level".
I've found upgrades work well when the upgrades are useful. This is the one thing that made me have to be unique with EnderCraft TD is that most creeps only have 1 life, so I couldn't use increased damage as an upgrade. But when you have a bomb tower that shoots a hunter-seeker that can't even catch up with the fastest creep due to moving too slowly and the next upgrade is a missile turret which shoots missiles twice as fast, it becomes a very useful upgrade.
Also, new abilities for towers are good upgrades; such as a tower that drops turrets being upgraded to drop splash bombs as well.
My opinion also (I've played almost every flash TD) is the TDs where all the towers do the same thing: target a creep, attack a creep, target a creep, attack a creep; is just boring.
FBender: liked your ideas about the different creeps having different caveats to them; that would make for a fun TD.
lol, that was the first reply in almost 5 months...
and to not make this post worthless:
Why doesn't anyone create a TD in which the creeps actually attack the towers? make 1 invincible barricade tower for mazing, and then have towers with different attack types/abilities to fight against creeps. This would also encourage building support towers like regeneration towers, armor towers, life steal towers, shielding towers, etc.
Dont put in the color of your tower defence. Such as Black Circle TD and Red Circle TD and Green Circle TD and Blue Circle TD. Also dont copy their triggers and terrain.
The single worst thing to do in a tower defense is make one tower needed. It should be balanced even to the point where the first tower will soften em up or give them a debuff, such as ice towers, so that the next towers can soften em up more. But in most games it's just have 20 of this one tower and you're good, wait you forgot to have 20 of these towers to deal with air units.
I sadly won't give you all my ideas for my work-in-project tower defence, but a few things not to put in a TD is easy to say.
- Upgrading your towers from level 1 to level 20 is easy to make, but also very boring to play.
- Playing throught hundreds of the same waves without any big difficulty is also boring.
- Massing the same 2 towers all throught the game is also very boring.
- Playing tower defenses alone or with few people can also be quite boring.
If you avoid doing the things above, you should have chances of atleast getting an okay result.
I hope this have been a little help for you map makers. When i get a thread up running with my tower defence, you all can feal free to check it out and maybe get any ideas.
~ Scorp