Programming & Level Designing Tower Offensive, Pt 5 (Level 7-9)

Hello again!

This time it’s level 7-9, unfortunately Level 10 is cut off from our GGC plan (on my order), It needs some more work before I show it to the world and there are some other things that are going to require my time that are more important than a new level. Nine levels for a 10 week project with 8ish weeks of production before showcasing will simply have to do. But fear not, It’s going to show up later, and it will be a ”new behavior” level, I can’t let you play more than three levels without giving you a new challenge 😉

Level 7

So my main though for level seven was ”Roads”, So two paths with two matching fields and a road connecting the two paths together, It became quite hard and quite weird, but not a total disaster, It feels like something is missing on it but I haven’t figured it out yet. So It will survive until I can figure something out to make it better but still mixing some of the different aspects we are using now.

Level 8

Main though was ”Speed” I wanted this to become a rush level with loads of fast enemies  charging the main camp. It turns out that a player can’t match resources at the speed of light so the big ”rush” waves is the two last ones. just to give the player a fighting chance to survive. The level got two matching fields but they are bigger than level 6 so they work better, but not perfect. I think I know what to do about it, but that would be implemented after GGC. So the though that might fix it is to fix the spawning chances for the different fields, so one field has a big chance for a few resources and the other field has a higher chance to spawn the other resources that’s available. It could work, at least worth testing.

Level 9

Last level to showcase, I wanted it to be hard but not impossible. So one big matching field just to give the player a chance, then have two roads splitting  up to three roads leading to the camp. It became hard, maybe too hard, The key to victory is to close of one path at the beginning before the get divided to three paths, and then just create a defense with all you got. So yeah this would work as an end game level but not as a level 9, players that are new to both tower defense and match 3 needs a few more levels to be prepared for something like this. It will not be a level showing up early in the game later on. but for GGC, sure why not?

 

Programming & Level Designing Tower Offensive, Pt 4 (Level 4-6)

So level 4-6 this time. I’m going to do like last post, just write something short about the levels. And yes I’m doing more than three levels a week, There are a lot of other things I do but I kinda wanted to write this in a nice order.

Level 4

This level introduces two paths to the player. I  took the layout for level 1 and just added another road, because this is usually a big step for players, they need to focus on defending two roads while matching for resources, and they have usually just unlocked our magic tower so it’s one more resource on the matching field to get use to as well. So an old road layout with a slightly larger matching field felt like a good choice to do this on.

Level 5

This became our ”icon” level, it was the first one in the game and we did almost all our system testing on it. The main thought though was Mid-Game. the players should have played some levels before this one, even multiple paths. So by dividing the roads in the beginning the players has a perfect level to use the block tower on (well It’s absolutely possible without the block tower, but it’s harder). But in order to get the block tower, they need to gather a lot of stone, so they would probably need to use their Ability to help them survive until they can buy the block tower. In that way the player is ”forced” to use all the things at his/hers disposal to win.

Level 6

The last of the introduction levels (just for ggc, I wants loads of new things for the levels later).  Two matching fields, yeah things are getting interesting now! Well this gives the player something more to do, when they are playing on a tablet they could match resources on two fields at the same time, but it’s also harder as well, two separate fields means that they are small and that means less chance to get power-ups. Well the main though was to show the players that we are going to use dual fields and later on add special behaviors on them and things like that. Matching is not going to become boring the further in to the levels they get. But let’s start at two regular fields at the same time. I also want to add that this level became bad, the matching fields became too small, it’s playable but not really enjoyable, this is probably the first level I’m going to change as soon as I get some more time on my hands.

Programming & Level Designing Tower Offensive, Pt 3 (Level 1-3)

So this post will be about level 1-3 in the game, As I mentioned in an earlier post I started at level 5 and when it was in I planned the lower levels (1-4) and I have now created level 1-3. of a total of 10 planned, All the levels for ggc will be to showcase what diversity we could have on the levels after 10 weeks and what they could expect later, and how much more we could add to create even more challenges.

Level 1

The main though on this level was Simplicity, It’s going to be the tutorial level, the first level the player experience. So a fairly big matching field(to help the matching), a single road(enemies goes from point a to point b without anything special happening) and few places for towers(to not overwhelm the players with choices in the beginning).

Level 2

This level was about introducing ”optimal” tower placements. it has two areas where towers could reach the enemies from two sides, doing more damage over time since the enemies has to move past it two times and if they survived they needed to move past yet another ”choke point”. So two choke points to help the player realize that there are sometimes on some levels more efficient places to put towers.

Level 3

This level was about increasing the difficulty, taking the layout on level 2 but removing a choke point and throwing some different kinds of enemies on the player, It has a choke point in the beginning  like the one on level 2  but upside down and then straight roads to the camp. By having a green theme applied to it also helped to give it a ”fresh” feeling and not much of the repetition feel it might give of otherwise.

Well this was all for the time,  Level 4-6 is next on the agenda. Cya!