Prototype 2 - Genetic Tower Defense

A tower defense game where you collect genomes from enemies and spend them on genetic "traits" to upgrade your silly little creatures (towers) into unstoppable freaks of nature, with the only limit (besides cost) being your imagination!

Core Loop: Buy tower spaces using Genome Points (GP), place creatures, spend more GP on traits to upgrade your towers, hit "Begin Round" to face off against a wave of enemies, defeat the enemies to collect more Genome Points and new Traits, spend those Genome Points to buy more tower spaces and traits, and repeat!

Controls: Mouse only - everything is controlled by clicking and dragging.

• Click on "Buy Space" to purchase tower spaces, so you can place creatures on them.
• Click and drag on the "Buy Tower (Free)" button to get a creature to place on purchased tower spaces.
• Click on a tower to bring up the trait menu, where you can purchase traits for the creatures.
• Click on "Begin Round" to spawn the next wave of enemies!

If playing in browser, play in fullscreen for best experience.

Reflections: 

   Connor----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Is it representative of the core loop you wanted?

   I am very happy with the core loop we explored. Its obviously not perfect, but it was a lot of fun and I think the results were pretty good. 

Did it give you an answer to the question you posed, and if so, what is the answer?

   The question we asked was "Does allowing the player to modify their towers modularly create a more engaging and dynamic system?" I don't know if its current state of play could be described as more engaging. In particular, the game doesn't provide enough feedback on what's actually happening. As for being dynamic however, I think our prototype does a pretty good job. 

How would you change it, if at all?

   I personally don't have any concrete thoughts here in regards to gameplay, other than that  I would wish to experiment more. Beyond that, I would want to improve the clarity of the game, as there is a lot that isn't very well communicated. 

Where would you take the idea next?

   I already mentioned more experimentation. I would want to play with a system of allowing creatures to "breed" and create a new one with an assortment of their parents traits. More enemies would be nice. The initial concept also included the potential for some kind of creature collection which would also be cool to try. 

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Nathan ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

This second demo was a collaborative project, something that I have some (but not much) experience with, and it was certainly an interesting experience. It was my first time using Unity in around half a year, which meant that I definitely needed to spend some time getting used to it again (not that brushing up on my C# is a bad thing, of course). It was also one of my first times using GitHub collaboratively, at least in a long time, which was excellent practice (especially when I made several massive mistakes). Most of the first week of this project was spent just debugging and trying to get things to merge, which thankfully they did, and thankfully we also had most of the core components of the game complete by the end of the week, but it was certainly also rather stressful. The game did start to come together well after this, and with a bit of brainstorming and a couple of in-person meetups and work sessions we made significant progress, but there was still a bit of a last-minute rush because we all ended up sick or busy.

I was not the one who imagined the core loop of our game, but I would say that the game absolutely embodies that core loop of defeating enemies, upgrading towers, and repeating, which is what I wanted. The branching upgrades aspect is maybe not quite to the level I was hoping for, since right now there’s still sort of that feeling of “stack as many upgrades as you can muster” that I was personally hoping to avoid just a bit more, but I do think there’s enough strategy that you can make all sorts of fun towers.

The question we wanted to answer was, “Does allowing the player to modify their towers modularly create a more engaging and dynamic system?” Honestly, I think we’d need to do a bit more testing to be sure, but from what I have played, I’d say the answer is a tentative yes. I feel like set upgrade paths are probably better overall for balance and strategy, but there’s something undeniably fun about being able to create bizarre combinations of traits with no real limit. I had a lot of fun just seeing what sorts of towers I could create, and I’d imagine that people with a bit more creativity could really go wild.

I think that, if I were to change the game, the big things I’d want to change would all be visual. I’d want costs for the traits on full display, more detailed attacks/projectiles, more contrast on the trait-picking menu, a fancier buy button, and maybe more effects such as enemies having an animation when defeated. In terms of more mechanical changes, I’d probably want to rebalance a few traits (Fire Breath is still ridiculously strong), rebalance the enemy scaling (the game is way too easy right now), and make the tower spaces line up properly. Those are all more tweaks than anything, and I don’t think I’d really change any of the actual core mechanical features as they are now.

If given the opportunity, I’d love to develop this game with the above tweaks, plus a fast-forward button, new maps, new difficult enemies for later rounds, more traits, and perhaps even multiple options for base towers. I think that visual polish and balance would definitely be the next steps I’d personally take, though, since I like the core of the game. I think that, with a relatively simple concept, additional content and polish are more important than entire new mechanics, but if I did have to pick some new mechanic, I’d probably want to add a more in-depth trait collection system (like perhaps having specific enemies drop specific traits).

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Nicholas ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The core loop presented in the demo was fun, and though it would likely lose it's entertainment value after any amount of extended play, but regardless I think it is mostly representitive of the basic loop we wished to demonstrate.

I belive it answers our question, that being would it be fun to modually adjust and modify towers, and I think the answer is yes. It is a fairly fun system to mess around with and figure out what combinations work well and also see how overpowered you can make your tower.

Adding descriptions to what each of the traits did when selecting them from the tower upgrade screen, also, losts of balancing is needed. It is far too easy to become overpowered and if we wished to make it into a full game we would need to make sure the player felt challenged to some degree for a decent period of time.

We would likely add enemies using traits and then dropping those specific traits when defeated. Maybe some extra juice like gene points physically dropping on the ground and you have to pick them up by hovering your cursor over them. Sound effects. More traits. More enemies. Perhaps more base tower types, like an upgraded one that starts with more range or something.