While recording the gameplay to make the new trailer, I kept tweaking the VFX more. If you caught me streaming in past 5 hours, you know what I mean. This build contains those changes and some enhancements to the level editor. Here's an itemized list
Tower Cost balancing
Now all the towers cost the same energy to build (except Wall). This energy can be changed by assigning up to 20 crystals to the Cost attribute. This change achieves two effects. The energy-to-crystal ratio remains same across all towers. And this makes Shock and Laser towers cheaper than before, encouraging their usage (after all they have the most glowing juicy effects). My previous assumption that the special nature of these towers should make them more expensive doesn't seem fair. Even though their special nature makes them powerful in certain scenarios, it makes them weaker in general purpose scenario when compared the the Gun. So all should have same costs.
VFX changes
Updated Spike hit and gate explosion SFX
Updated most of the explosion and hit VFX to contain more glow, which makes the action more energetic.
Fixed the lingering gate aim indicator if Tower is reclaimed while in focus
Added a stem to the healing beam emanating from the healing flowers
Added a new hit VFX on the enemy when it's hit by a shock wave (in addition to the concussion expression)
Removed the bubble vfx when enemy is wading through the water. It doesn't look that nice and it may as well be absent
Enhanced to the Settings UI. Added Save and Reset buttons.
Editor changes
Fixed the sluggishness in the Level Editor UI
Added brush size for terrain painting
Optimized the redraw code in level editor making the painting much faster and smoother
Added controls to modify the enemy spawn details from the gate.
I'll be streaming live on the afternoons in the next 3 days, as part of the "Games from Quebec" sale event. Join me to check out some new levels.
Cheers!
Skull Gate update (v0.8.0)
Hi all,
A new instalment of eye-candy updates. This time it's the Enemy gate.
The main target of the gameplay is the Enemy gate. The Guns have to shoot it down in order to win. So it has to look hard to break. I went through several design choices, but finally settled on a rock shaped like a skull. It feels great when it cracks open at the end.
Another major hurdle is the creep. Continuing my experiments with the colors, I decided to use a red tint for the creep which works as a good backdrop for enemy and towers. White skull and red tentacled creep makes sense.
Here's a complete list of changes:
Skull gate design, with new VFX and SFX for emergence and destruction of the gate
Tentacled creep design with new hit VFX
An indicator ring on the gate that lights up when you hover over a tower that has the gate in its range. This saves you from guessing if the range of tower is enough to shoot on the gate.
Improved the Spike damage sequence, so that enemy is spiked when it reaches to the center of the spike. New VFX and SFX.
The health of the gate is not the same in all levels. It's now shown in the Gate panel when you hover over the gate. That gives you an idea of how difficult it's going to be to destroy the gate.
Added slide-in animations for the help panels and the Pause panel
Added a handler for Steam overlay invocation which cause the game to pause if you invoke steam overlay (Shift+tab).
A demo build is now available again
That's all. Keep an eye for some special events coming up later in this week. I'll be live streaming on the Steam page this week as part of an event. I'll design new maps and play them live. Hope you will join me.
Cheers!
Time Record Histograms (v0.7.0)
Hi all,
In this week's update I've added a new feature that will increase the replay value of Dofense significantly.
You can now compete with others on the time you take to win the battle. And because of the unique gameplay mechanic of Dofense, there are two kinds of records that you can set.
You can be the fastest by figuring out a way to win in the shortest amount of time. You can experiment with various weapons, credit distribution and gameplay strategies to shorten this time as much as you can. If your time is in bottom 10% of historically recorded times, then you win the special medal.
The other medal is for those who know how long they can hold the fort. You can try to stretch out the battle as long as you can by delaying your attack on the enemy gate. That sounds easy? Well, try it. Of course, you have to still win the battle for the time record to count. This record will require good judgment on your part about the size of the crowd you can handle. If you record a time in top 10% of other players, you get the "Crowd Crusher" medal.
Every time you win a battle, your time is recorded on a server which allows creation of these histograms.
Besides this big update there are other small ones too
Updated the introductory help panels for each enemy type, that show up when first time an enemy is making an entrance in the game. The panels are now center aligned. Before, the camera used to zoom on the enemy. This has been removed because it could cause errors if the player is placing towers when the help panel shows
Update Manual with new images of towers and enemies
When enemies hit a train from the side, they now wait until the train to pass. Before they used to pass through the train, which was obviously weird.
The Juicy update (v0.6.1)
Hi all,
The wait is over. The new build is now available. Here is a list of things that has changed.
Enemy characters redesign -
All the 10 character types were recreated. Each one has a set of animations for different actions (mainly walking and taking different kinds of damages). The new character rigs are grouped in three separate sorting layers, so when a lot of enemies are close together, everyone's heads show up at the top. This makes the crowd look sensible, unlike before when one character's feet would appear over the head of its neighbour and all sense of top-down view would be lost.
All enemy characters now have rich and distinct colour palettes.
Every kind of damage and the final death of the enemy is now shown with a juicy visual effect and appropriate sound effects.
Towers redesign - Just like all the enemies, the towers have been redone too. The functionality is unchanged, but the graphics, animations and VFX have been updated.
All the sprites used in above redesigns have twice the resolution of their old versions. It means they look nicer when zoomed in.
Optimization - All the towers and enemies are now managed through a pool, which keeps the memory usage to minimum. This kind of optimization is done to reduce garbage collector interference. However, I would like to mention that you may find certain glitches in enemy movement on large maps. I'm aware of this issue and it will be addressed in future.
Sound effects are now implemented through a pool architecture
The code that decides the Tower's rate of fire on enemy gate was changed to create more deterministic behaviour. Whenever an enemy gate is within the range of a tower, it will attack it at least once every 4 seconds. It will typically get distracted by the enemies and any creep nearby. But it's now guaranteed that the crowd won't be able to mask the gate unfairly from the tower attack.
Added Shift+Tab hotkey to slowdown the time (Pressing only the Tab button speeds up the time and wrap around)
Flat coloured obstacle terrain tiles. This is still WIP.
Redesign of opening menu layout. Also the overall media assets on Steam store page have been updated to match the flat-stylized color style.
Added a checkbox to the Settings to hide health bars over enemies. In case you don't like them.
That's all for now.
Let me know what do you think about the new look. Cheers!
Devlog: What's coming to Dofense next week?
Hi all,
Hope you had a wonderful time during the holidays. Happy new year!
I myself took a short break from working on Dofense. Spent most of it playing Stardew Valley. ːsteamhappyː
Apart from that, I worked mostly on the Juice - GFX, VFX, SFX. There was a lot of work involved in designing sprites for all the animations for each of the 10 enemy types. It's still work in progress. I haven't finalized all the colors yet. On top of that I wanted to update all the tower designs as well. Moreover this was a great opportunity to do some reorganization of the code to achieve some optimization.
Anyway, I know you are waiting for some eye-candy.
Explosions are nice to look at. They give a good sense of accomplishment, by informing you on how much destruction you are causing to the enemy. But how can the enemy crowd be made more lively when they are not yet ready to explode and die. One way I'm trying to achieve that is by means of expressive faces. Below are some of the expressions that you will see on the enemies when they take different types of damage.
Showing some attitude when they capture a core
Crying out on health damage
Getting concussion from Shock waves
Getting zapped by Volta in style
In the Tower Defense gameplay we spend a lot of time waiting and watching the enemies suffer. This is one way I'm trying to make that time enjoyable.
I can't wait for you to get your hands on this stuff. I'm working hard to release something next week. Stay tuned!
Cheers
0.5.1 patch
This is a quick fix for a regression that caused "Spooked by the tree" level crash upon launch.
Devlog: Updating the visuals
Hi all,
I'm making some sweeping changes in the looks department. So next build is still few days away. But I've some GIF eye candy in this post to keep you up-to-date.
One ugly issue I want to fix has to do with the crowds of enemies. Right now each enemy is rendered in a single sprite. As a result when they make a mess when they are close together. It's common to see the feet of some enemies trampling over the heads of their neighbours - completely spoiling the illusion of a top down look. I've now fixed this issue by dividing the enemy visuals in 3 sprites that are kept in their own sorting layers. As a result, when enemies are crowded, they are mostly seen as bunch of heads, as you would in real life.
Did you notice the expressions? Is the enemy pain conveyed adequately now?!
I'm experimenting with colors. In the past I had a tendency to maintain a two-colour palette, one for the player side (blue) and another for the enemy (pink-purple). That made it easy to distinguish between regions of threats and strengths on the map. However it also made the overall look dull. Lately I've been playing Hades a lot and binged Arcane on Netflix. These are milestone examples of how to create energetic experiences using stylized graphics. I would like to infuse same kind of energy in Dofense, without disturbing the player interaction (no screen shakes!)
So in that regard, I've assigned different colors to each of the enemy classes. I've also redone the visuals of Sprinters completely.
Do you like the explosions? The slimy monsters now explode with a punch.
Wait for the new burn FX.
What do you think?
I still have a lot of changes in the pipeline. You might have noticed new sprites for Gun towers. I want to upgrade the looks of all the towers (and the Energy center, and the Enemy gates, and the terrain, and ...). Hope you will be patient with me.
The good news is Omicron seems to have spoiled my vacation plans, so I'll get to spend that time working on this long list. Yay! ;).
Stay safe and take care!
v0.5.0 - New NPC - Overseers
Hi all,
Just pushed out a new build with one new level in the Sector 2. It introduces a new NPC - Overseers.
These are literally the "eyes in the sky" that wander around. Once in a while they take fancy to one of your towers and decide to spoil it, by dumping some juicy creep on it. This inhibits the tower from functioning. But that's not an end for the tower. Any nearby tower can shoot the creep down and clean the spoiled tower. That will get it back in order and shooting at enemies again.
The overseers spawn from wells after certain number of enemies sacrifice themselves into it. So you can prevent the spawning of Overseers in the first place, if you choose to isolate the well from enemy access.
Can't wait to hear what you think about it. Give it a shot.
Some other things that were fixed:
A regression in Creep population algorithm was fixed. It was introduced in last build and went unnoticed. It must have led to some excessive creep in some levels. It's fixed in this build.
Camera movement is now smoother, thanks to switch to Unity's Cinemachine virtual cameras. I had them for a long time, but had disabled them because I didn't know how to get them working in Pause mode. I figured it out recently.
Cheers!
v0.4.1 - New mechanic - Core Mint
Hi all,
Just posted a new build v0.4.1
This update introduces a new game mechanic that explores the energy production side of the strategy. As you know, the energy required to build towers is generated by the cores circulating in the Energy center. If less number of cores are active, then the rate of energy production is low. So far, you always start with 6 cores in the energy center. What if you were to start with less and you could generate more cores during gameplay. That's what Core Mint is.
Core Mint is a device with three batteries. You have to charge these batteries in order to generate new cores. The batteries consume energy while charging. The task of Battery charging is queued in the task queue, just like any other tower build or upgrade tasks. You have to decide how many towers you want to build to thwart initial waves of enemy, before you allocate energy to generate more cores.
Moreover, in some scenarios, the batteries are buried underneath the creep, so you have to first clear away the creep before you can charge them.
There are 3 new levels in this build that explore some of the Core Mint strategies.
Other updates:
Fixed a bug that was counting ghosts as living enemies and causing the level not to end even when all other enemies were killed. (addresses this thread)
Added blurring effect as the level finishes
The level now finishes as soon as necessary number of cores are lost. There's no need to wait around till all cores are lost to the enemy gate, because the battle is already lost.
There is one more level that features the Magzones introduced in the last update.
0.3.2
Introducing Sector 2 with 4 battles
3 new mechanics implemented that you can play in Sector2 :
Magzones - Tiles marked with magnet symbol create magnetic field, which deflects bullets. Therefore the guns built on these tiles will miss targets 50% of the time. Does not affect other kinds of towers
Healing flowers - Enemies sacrifice themselves to bloom the healing flowers. Once bloomed they heal the enemies passing by
Haunted Trees - If enemies die in the shadow of the haunted trees, they will turn into ghosts and circle the tree. They will provide shield to the enemies passing under the tree.
1 new battle added to Sector 1
Reimplemented enemy's path tracing code so that it works consistently even when gameplay is fast fowarded by 4x
Rebalancing changes
Volta cost and recharge time were increased to justify its power
Volta is not effective (i.e. electrocution of enemies) when enemies are inside Glitch trap
Glitch trap douses fire
Spikes don't harm Roller enemies if they are rolling fast over them
Rollers don't catch fire on lava if it's rolling over it
Enemies don't catch fire if they are in water (they could already douse existing fire when entering water)
Added Steamworks.net library for future use. Doesn't do anything right now.
Editor enhancements to add Healing flowers, Haunted Trees and Magzones
