Wasn't this going to be a tower defense game?

[Buttons840]

I thought AVWW was originally said to be a tower defense game with lost of tower types and semi-intelligent enemies?

[Mánagarmr]

That was a LOOOONG time ago. Read up on the blog. Chris goes into detail about the shift in game design for AVWW.

[x4000]

On the website page for the game it has the full explanation, actually, too.

[BobTheJanitor]

Tower defense games are overdone and strategically mind-numbing anyway. Almost all of them tend towards a single best design and best upgrade path for any given level. So if you don't know what that is, you can't play the game well, and if you do then you're just following a formula. And then you can hardly claim that you're playing a game. I get bored very quickly with any pure TD games for just that reason.

[Teal_Blue]

Tower defense games are overdone and strategically mind-numbing anyway. Almost all of them tend towards a single best design and best upgrade path for any given level. So if you don't know what that is, you can't play the game well, and if you do then you're just following a formula. And then you can hardly claim that you're playing a game. I get bored very quickly with any pure TD games for just that reason.

Just a thought, not to change how you feel about TD's, but wouldn't it be cool to have a TD where the other side levels, and your side has to do research, perhaps from points accumulated from the number and kinds of enemies you have shot down, to level your own side?   

Might make for an interesting twist on an otherwise 'formula' kind of approach, don't you think?   

Gosh, I wish i could code!   

I get all these ideas, and not a c++ in sight, 

Well...

I guess i can still try to take the classes and learn.



-Teal

[KingIsaacLinksr]

Killing enemies to advance in Tower Defense games is typically how they work.  Not particularly new.  And no, naming it "research points" doesn't change that your still accumulating something from killing enemies.  (Tower Defense addict here )

Speaking of tower defense games, I picked up Defense Grid this year during Christmas.  Crazy difficult yet still fun and indie too.  All sorts of win with this game .

King

[Commiesalami]

If you've got an Xbox, take a look at Toy Soldiers on the Arcade for an interesting Tower Defense game.  Its actually a little scary how a tower defense game is so well related to the tactics of WW1.

Its been announced for PC but I don't know when its coming out.

[Ozymandiaz]

For some reason I rather enjoy TD games. Not sure when I played my first one, but it was a custom map I downloaded for StarCraft 1 years ago, that made you build some Zerg towers to kill off units .

However, there are a lot of very poor TD games out there, making it hard to find the actual good ones.

[BobTheJanitor]

Defense Grid is a good TD game to me, which means I can usually manage about one level a week or so and then I get bored again. It seems to err more on the side of playability rather than having the perfect build order, which I appreciate. What bugs me is that, at the top end of difficulty at least, every one of these games (that I've seen) turn into a paint-by-numbers. Mathematically, in order to get the furthest you have to build two of tower A, then three of tower B, then upgrade one of A and one of B, twice, then build tower D, etc. etc. Anyone just going into it and tossing down towers where they like and hoping for the best is going to fail. Anyone who builds an extra tower when they're meant to upgrade but follows the rest of the build order exactly isn't going to get as far. It's almost like it's trying to be a pure puzzle game, instead of a hybrid action game. But if you fail you have to start not just the most recent puzzle again, you have to start the entire game over again. Bleh. Also the slippery slope of not having enough or the right type of firepower so the waves push through too far, so your firepower is distracted, so you don't get a good start on the next wave, and so you keep falling further behind...

Anyway, I'm going to stop ranting, but I really just have little patience for TD games. I don't know why I feel that way, I don't think I've seen anyone else like that, but they really bug me.

[KingIsaacLinksr]

@Ozy, agree, it is very difficult to find a good defense tower game.  I actually played several TD games on SC1 and enjoyed it during that time.  Haven't gotten around to it in SC2 yet.  Plants VS Zombies is a good one, but really lacks replayability. 

Which btw @Bob, PVZ allows for this more forgiving gameplay.  But as I said already, lacks replayability.  But I agree, would love to see some more forgiving gameplay in the Tower Defense department and less mathmatical equations to success.  Not sure how it can be pulled off and still be challenging at this point.  But if anyone figures out the magical formula, they will be very awesome

King

[x4000]

For what it's worth, Bob, I really like tower defense games for specifically the reasons you mention. I would never call it "paint by numbers," but it is NOT a strategy genre. As you say, it's a puzzle genre with strategy-ish trappings. I view them as optimization problems, which is a sort of thinking I really enjoy, and which is underrepresented in video games in general.

I think there's nothing wrong with the above sort of concept as a genre, but when people bring the wrong sort of expectations to a subgenre like this is going to lead to disappointment. If you want to play chess, billiards is never going to satisfy that desire.

[BobTheJanitor]

And maybe it just bugs me because it doesn't put all its cards on the table. If it wants to be a puzzle game, show me the pieces. This is a gun tower, it does 5 damage to this unit and 10 damage to this unit. This is a fire tower, it does... etc. This is a list of every unit that is going to come at you and the times they will be released at. Go!

That I would probably enjoy a lot more. Then it would be admitting that it's a puzzle and playing like one. Most of the games I've seen only tell you that a tower is 'good' against some type of unit, but don't tell me how good, and they expect you to react on the fly with limited information and in a scenario where a misstep can lose you the game, but not for another 20 minutes. That type of gameplay just leads to aggravation for me. It's a puzzle where they don't show you what the finished picture looks like, and all the pieces are face down, but when one flips up you have to put it in the right spot immediately. Ugh.

PvZ, I did enjoy, although I agree it doesn't have much replay value, because once I finished it I haven't ever really gone back. The forgivable nature is more what I look for in a game that has time pressure. That means I can't paint myself into a corner (and then waste 10 minutes more until I realize it).

And the TD elements of AIW don't bother me either, for the same reasons. You can have the 'wrong' type of turrets defending a wormhole for some certain wave type, but they're still going to do some damage to whatever comes through. And if I want, I can pause so there's no time pressure, and then go check the reference guide to find exactly what I want to have and build those turrets up. Plus no fiddly upgrades to worry about. Maybe it's OCD, but I'm always bothered when I can't tell if some TD game is designed so that building more level 1 units is better than upgrading those units to level 2. There never seems to be any rhyme or reason to it. No matter what I do I feel like I'm wasting resources somehow.

[x4000]

Aha -- a lot of astute observations there. I suppose I should have mentioned, I really like TD games in SPITE of a lot of things that really annoy me in the genre. You hit on a lot of then there. My reason for previously wanting to do a TD game of my own was to take the parts that I really love from the genre, and jettison the rest for something new.

Granted, that's sort of what we tried with tidalis, and that's hard to explain to people. "This game is just like the rest of a genre you're really tired of, except not really at all, and it has a bunch of new bits replacing all the other bits that bugged us." That's... Amit several reasons we aren't making a TD game at the moment. There are way too many TD games right now, some excellent, most not.

[KingIsaacLinksr]

I have such a great image of my dream TD game, but lacking...idk, coding skills, artistic abilities....$$.....basically everything to do it makes it rather frustrating to have that image and watch most fall short. 

I pretty much agree with everything you said Bob.

King

[Buttons840]

X and friends, have you seen Comet Crash on the Playstation Network?  You should look up some youtube videos because there's a lot of potential in that type of PvP tower defense.