Tau Defense
Live stream for Steam Game Festival
See you one Feb 4, 2PM EST. Set a reminder.
Dofense Demo
TLDR: The development has resumed after a break of nine months and weather looks clear for a 2021 release. For details, read on.
Last update from me was nearly a year ago. In this post I would like to put down why I stopped working on this game and then resumed again.
If you go through earlier posts, you will notice a drastic change in the looks of the game. It is because I was experimenting a lot. I've to admit that I didn't have a clear picture in my head of what the final game was going to look like. I only knew I wanted to make a TD game, because I liked this genre and my first shot at it ("Fold wars") did reasonably good as a free game.
However all my ideas of what a better TD game would feel like, were highly subjective. Many of them turned out to be misguided. As a result none of the prototypes ended up in a fun gameplay. Nearly a year ago, I felt lost after spending so much time on this game. At that point, I did what I should have done already. I spent a lot of time playing popular TD titles. I realized that almost all of them were focused on the XP grind. You play through a finite number of maps, but as you make progress you can only win if you play with strong abilities. Through each play you accumulate XP and you use it to upgrade your abilities. So when you replay the same maps again, you have higher chance to clear them. This mechanic offers a lot of replayability to the players and probably that's what the audience seems to like (even though eventually they would get tired of it). In this light, my plan seemed completely off the mark. My hope for improvement in TD was 3D environment, a custom level editor and focus on variety of strategies. The first two of these seem irrelevant to fun gameplay. I didn't feel inclined to implement the XP grind mechanism on top of my TD gameplay. So I decided to stop working on the game for the time being.
I worked on other game ideas for the rest of 2020. You can find more about them from my website. I made these games in 2D. This was in contrast to what I was doing with Dofense. I like doing 3D, because I'm familiar with 3D modelling tools. I'm not as confident with my 2D drawing skills. And somewhere I had this misguided notion that 3D assets look automatically better than 2D. These misconceptions went away as I developed some small 2D games over the year. I gained more experience with Unity's 2D features and acquired more confidence in creating 2D artwork myself in Inkscape and Krita.
With these new tools under my belt, I gave another look to Dofense in November. Soon I decided I was ready to resume work on Dofense. The demo published today, is first playable build after a development sprint of last two months.
Now Dofense has a simplified 2D environment, which allows me to do quick experiments when it comes to visual quality of graphics and effects. My understanding of "juice" or "game-feel" has also improved over time. I still have much to learn in those areas, but I'm positive that the game feels more polished than before. This area requires lot of experimentation. Moreover I've certain ideas about how to increase replayability of this game, without putting the player through XP grind. I'll talk more about it as I make progress. Join my Discord for more discussions about game's development.
The demo does NOT have much content at the moment. I wanted to put it out there in preparation for the Steam festival next month. I'll update the demo a few times before the event adding new mechanics and level maps.
Stay tuned and stay safe.
Story so far
First prototype (Fall 2018)
I started working on this tower defense game as a more thought out commercial version of Fold Wars (my earlier 2D web based tower defense game). In the Fall of 2018 I had this first prototype working using Unity.
[previewyoutube="EBLiclq801c;full"]
Since I'm not an artist (although I'm trying), I wanted to maintain the minimal abstract look from Fold Wars. I had decided to go for low poly models that I created myself. I implemented the basic gameplay, but I was disappointed with the look. I couldn't get the juicy look that many low poly indie games achieve.
In search of glamour (Late 2018)
After this prototype, I decided to focus on learning how to create more glamorous look. While pursuing another game idea I had developed some skills in creating mechanical models. So I started experimenting with tower models that were elaborate mechanical devices. I thought that will make them look better. It was at the same time that I started learning about the concept loosely called "Game juice". I made some models and posted on Reddit to get some feedback and some of them received good response. Here's one for example.
I discovered several new techniques to create better looking visuals. I use Blender for 3D modeling. Around this time I learnt about Substance Painter, which is super useful to create beautiful materials after they come out of Blender. I started giving rustic metal look to the towers. Here's another screenshot from those days. In addition to rich materials this one uses Post processing techniques available in Unity.
Even though the look was appealing now, I found that my focus on mechanical details of the models wasn't serving the bigger goal of creating fun gameplay. Given the enormous amount of work needed to create such elaborate 3D models, it proved to be the wrong path. A typical RTS game's view point is top-down. Most of the time the camera is high up in the sky. The details of the models are not distinguishable to the player from that distance. The thing I learned is: Adding details won't make models necessarily beautiful.
Dungeons (Summer 2019)
Around this time (early 2019), I decided to start from scratch and build a new version focused on gameplay. I decided not to spend any time in creating any original 3D models - and use off the shelf stuff from Unity asset store. In this iteration I switched from square grid to hexagonal grid. Also I decided to not use Unity's NavMesh for path finding and instead write my own. In retrospect this was the best decision I made. Unity's NavMesh is a sophisticated solution that also incorporates physics into path finding. This was not necessary for my requirement. Due to the physics, the NavMesh solution gets very slow as number of agents increase (about 100+). Also they start behaving erratically. My implementation doesn't care about collisions between attacker units. It scales well and I've been able to tweak the algorithm and data structures as my requirements have changed over time.
This implementation became "Tau Defense". The name under which I first created this Steam product page. I made a snappy trailer.
[previewyoutube="uUfvFyx8E3c;full"]
The early version had about 12 battles, 6 types of towers and 8 kinds of enemies. It was fun to play. The gameplay was set. The look was pretty. I was almost ready to release it like that.
... However, some things were still not quite right.
The dungeon themed environment and enemies were gorgeous. I had started with stock 3D models from asset store and modified them so much that in the end I had almost created them from scratch to get the look I wanted. I also animated them on my own. But even though this made them look pretty, the details were not quite visible from the bird's eye (as I described earlier). Or to be more correct, the details were not giving the satisfaction of killing the crowds of enemy with cleverly placed towers. The enemies and the background environment were in similar warm colors, so any added details were lost due to the lack of color contrast. It didn't feel satisfactory. However I didn't abandon this look right away. It happened gradually during the Fall of 2019. And it happened as I started making a map editor.
Editor (Late 2019)
As you can see I did get the map editor generate the dungeon theme battles.
But around this time I again started experimenting with abstract models, in the hope of fixing the lost-details-problem. I also discovered a local play-testing event in Montreal and first time saw other people playing my game. The feedback from this was very useful and I made changes based on some good suggestions.
Gameplay simplification (January 2020)
During past few weeks I made a fundamental change in the logic of gameplay. Thus far the game consisted of enemies coming to steal your Qi. You as a player build towers so that they get killed before they carry the Qi to their gate. This was the same basic mechanic in Fold Wars and it was inspired by Defense Grid 2. It gave an opportunity to create a detailed scoring mechanism and multiple aspects of strategy (path length, energy usage etc.) that could be optimized by the player. This is what had attracted me to it in the beginning.
However the more I thought about it, I realized that it's only an elaborate scoring mechanism. It doesn't contribute in any way towards making the gameplay fun. In fact, it makes the goal of the game less clear. I found this out when I saw some players getting confused when they started playing the game during playtesting. One player didn't really know why he should care to save the Qi. The enemy threat had to be more tangible. This is why I made a small, yet important change in the gameplay.
The goal now is simple. Save the base. Enemy is coming to destroy your base and you have to kill it before it succeeds in doing so.
Once I started down the path, I found some good metaphors. The base is now an Egg that you protect. The enemy are these colorful squishy humanoid that you have to shoot down with the towers. And a load of fun it is to see them explode. The enemy models are not detailed and are painted in single color. Yet they have roughly humanoid shape which gives them certain character. The role their look has to play is clearly indicate the advance of enemy waves and show its destruction with most satisfying effects.
If you fail to kill the enemies, they will attack your egg and they will be terrifyingly loud. It lets you know that it's not good for you. The threat is evident. I'm hoping that this change makes the goal pretty clear. I look forward to feedback.
In future posts I'll post screenshots and videos of the new look. Some of it you can already see in the artwork and screenshots.
Update on delay
I got some feedback from players at a local demo event. I've revised several things based on that feedback. The look has changed a lot in an effort to create a unique art style, but also to make it extendable. The gameplay has changed a little to remove unnecessary mechanics that players didn't find fun. The editor has been made more solid. I had to change the look and art style so that it could be procedurally generated, because the editing of maps is the most important feature of this game.
Also the name and branding of this game is going to change. The current name probably has potential IP conflicts. To avoid any future troubles, I'll be renaming the game. Before I do that I need to update all artwork and in order to do that I need to finish the look of the game. I would like to think I'm almost there, but it's hard to quantify remaining work in any creative project like a game.
At the moment I am aiming towards finalizing the look by the end of January and release the game in Early Access by the end of February. I can't wait to get this game in the your hands.
Cheers!
First look at the Map Editor
I've also added more juicy model as a Qi Chamber. It still needs work though. But you can see how the map editor easily lets you switch back-n-forth between edit and play mode.
I had great time showing this around at a playtesting session in Montreal yesterday.
More things are coming soon. Stay tuned.
Update #3 Idle Animations
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46-pV8lXc0Y
You can see it now in a beta build by signing up here
Update #2 New towers and enemies
New Volta tower, that can zap the enemies to death.
New enemy Red Giant. He will stun the towers with his staff. Before this all enemy units were passive. It's one of the first mechanics that impairs towers. More will be added in future too.
If you would like to beta test the game, sign up here
http://www.bluemathsoftware.com/taudefense-signup.html?
Update #1 Character animations and PBR materials
Here are the results in a 1 minute video.
https://youtu.be/XdHNsfNU8vs
Want to play Tau Defense right now?
This is my second Tower Defense game. The first one (Fold Wars) was a proof-of-concept implementation that you can play in browser. I gained some valuable experience in creating an enjoyable TD gameplay by working on Fold Wars. I'm building on that experience to develop a more detailed and better-looking Tower Defense game. I've been working on it for past 8 months and it's finally ready with a playable demo of Tau Defense
Game's description page and the trailer shows what has so far been implemented, I won't go into it again. The demo contains 4 battle maps, each with multiple win conditions. It's at least 1-2 hours of playtime. Going forward I'm going to add more towers, more enemies and more mechanisms that will really make a unique Tower Defense game. Moreover I want to implement custom level editor (or what is called "Creative Mode" these days) to create custom battles.
So stay tuned. Exciting things are coming!
I invite you to play early builds of the game and give your suggestions to shape the game better. Join the mailing list and I'll send you links to private builds as my computer spits them out.
You can also Follow the game on Steam and you will get regular updates on this community hub.
Cheers and thanks for your support!