With loadshedding (powercuts) in full force again I have gone back to rambling about a tower defense game idea and or if I think of anything else that. For now the tower defense. For fuck sakes Grammarly I will spell it defense. SHUT UP!
In my rambling about *juice and stuffs I realised I am too lazy to build a map. So I went looking and although I will probably end up with something like Hextml I found Inkarnate to look and deliver the part.
Inkarnate Maps
They are kinda like the PixelSquid of fantasy and game maps with a ton of prebuilt assets and a very good free tier. Now I don't play board games because I do not allow people near my house or go to other peoples dens of suffering but I can see how useful this tool can be for small games and whatnot.
There are about 6 big types of maps and 3 of them are free with base textures and some filler content like towers and houses.
For just large overview maps you will not want for a thing, I think the free stuff is very capable of filling a map and making it very presentable.
Then there is the editor, so aside from being able to just let it generate a world for you. You can go in and fiddle and place things as you wish right in the browser.
As you see I made two pieces of land with fuckol, I mean a void in the middle. This has to do with how I want my map to begin empty and only void monsters can cross the void until you place tiles there.
Obviously next I decided that is fugly with this type of thing so let me add a ocean. I brushed a bunch of the blue textures they have until I got a nice layered look that works best in comparison to the ugly, dead land.
Exported from Inkarnate ~ Free assets
Then I added everything.
The final export is also not exactly tiny, it is perfect for a pleb like me at a solid 2K resolution , not sure what the fuss is about with 4K and crap I still watch things in 720p and fawn at TV can be so real.
My thingy
Now obviously as mentioned my game is actually not this style, well in my head it is not because in my head it is all hexagons.
Although a hexagon grid can easily be placed over this and each piece can then be assembled for the main land areas as required.
Since I do want no pieces aside from the starting bases. See the two castles to be on the board when it all starts the land will effectively be discovered or built.
So more the below kinda map but pretty like above.
Every player will get a new tile to add as they go, so far there are only 3 types:
- Road
- Land
- Tower
These are chosen randomly and they can either place it or bank it and get the next tile in the set time. Banked tiles are hidden until you have filled all the slots say 5 and if the 5th tile goes in the other person can see it.
Then units I only want the 3 types:
- Magic
- Archer
- Melee
I already mentioned the void monsters so they double as dragon types you could say and can fly straight to the opposing castle. Minimal damage, maybe a thousand hits required to destroy a castle or tower from them.
I want Melee to be 10 times stronger than Void monsters and Archers are 4 times weaker than Melee but with double the attack speed. Something like that.
Then I want *juice.. Asterix Juice.
Units come out in set times with say the Void monsters every 10 seconds, Archers every 30 seconds and Melee every minute or so.
One unit is a squad of 5.
You need to get kills etc to get *juice which is used to set ability boosts for each unit type. So if you want Melee to be faster that is fine make them faster but you will need the *juice to add those stats combined with then maybe making them weaker.
Ideally then one unit can almost act like another in base stats.
Their abilities I am not sure of but one thing is, a tower you place is empty with minimal attack but still max defense abilities. Towers can be destroyed. Units are needed to occupy a tower to then have it obtain attack.
This means you can move the units to new towers if you like and if you combine them all maybe it is a general tower with all 3 types of attacks at a third of the power though.
You need to be able to destroy towers because you only win when you conquer the map.
Unit abilities I think so far are:
- Void flies and Melee cannot attack them
- Archers retreat and or find cover. They will always go towards the nearest tower when they meet enemies and use it to avoid being attacked directly and or retreat to the castle.
- Melee is hard, I thought of something like enrage, as in they have massive health so the longer they are under attack the stronger and or faster they hit.
Then I thought ok well Leaders are nice, people like heroes and if it were to be a blockchain thingy then they would be your NFT including say a *juice tank you can have , I do want to avoid pay to win but also milking so will think on it.
Leaders though don't need powers beyond the base type they just give something to new units that are made while they survive.
Then lastly well kinda, is that the closer you get to a Castle the better the defenses are within its region of influence. So possibly a losing side will have higher health in their castle because of a fixed final proximity boost.
I dunno , I do know I want *juice though.