HTD Day 1

Like Pokemon Tower Defense, Hero Tower Defense was born from the idea of combining two great things into one package. In this case we want to combine the things we all love the most from MMORPGs into the tower defense formula. Also everything that I've learned from PTD that I know you guys like will make it into the game as well.What you can expect from the game is:

Just like Pokemon Tower Defense your towers will stay leveled up as your play. At first you start alone but as you beat levels you will meet new companions that you will add to your party and eventually form your own guild and take on bosses.
 * Different classes like: Warrior, Mage, Priest, Rogue, etc.
 * Loot Drops from enemy and bosses.
 * Armor and weapons
 * A unique talent tree for each classes
 * Different races
 * Quest
 * Achievements
 * Crafting
 * Auction House
 * Guilds
 * Raids
 * Co-op
 * Versus
 * Mounts
 * Pets
 * and more!

We have many more details to offer but today I want to talk more about the artist for the game. As some of you might know I sent out a request on the blog for any artist that was interested in joining Dan and I on the quest to create games. Many people applied but we narrowed it down to the top 9 artist, and then we sent them all a challenge. The challenge was to create a "tower" for Hero Tower Defense, we gave them very basic instructions so that they could fill in the holes. One contestant caught our eye and he ended up winning. We saw the other 8 entries and they were good but we felt this one captured exactly what Dan and I wanted to do for Hero TD. Below is his entry for the challenge.

Since we picked Kevin he has been hard at work making animations for the tower units and creating armor, each week we will show you a new piece of artwork so look forward to that.

So for the day that we worked on Hero TD I talked to Dan about level maps. There are two types of TD games. Ones like PTD that you have a limited number of spots that you can put your towers and some that any where in the map can be a spot. For HTD we want to do a mix of these two. The enemy will go down his path similar to PTD but in HTD you will have a lot more spots to work with. The reason for more spots is a new mechanic that I thought would be great for the game. I'm calling it the "Chain Buff" mechanic. Let's say you have a Warrior Tank (Tank is a tower designed to take the damage and defend the other towers), and he has a passive buff that makes his health higher. Well if you have any other Tower that is next to this tank tower they will also receive this buff thanks to the "Chain Buff" mechanic. Also if another tower is touch somebody that receive the buff they will also receive it. Thus you can create a chain of towers that will all receive the buff. The drawback is that some enemies will have attacks that will attack everybody in a chain. So you will have to be quick about breaking the chain when those attacks come.

I made some awesome diagrams for you guys below.

Well that's all I have for you today, I hope you enjoyed the post and I can't wait to talk more about and show you more about HTD. Dan told me he was also going to post something on this same post so keep checking back for more. As always let me know what you think! Dan: Sam covered most of the current topics we discussed together so I'll give you guys some insight into how HTD will progress without hindering the other games and some other tidbits. As you know Sam works primarily on PTD while I work on Ninja-ja with the addition of Kevin doing most of the HTD graphics. Since I've learned some more about programming from Ninja-ja (sorry for the slow updates btw) I'll be helping Sam out on that end as well as helping Kevin out on graphics. We also both think about HTD's design and concepts while we work on the other games, so while it might seem like we don't have the time we're really just multitasking and doing stuff at the same time. So never fear! Also something worth mentioning is we want HTD to be a good mix of what we both enjoy the most in games. This works out really well for Sam and I because we lean slightly different ways when it comes to genres and such. While we both enjoy and play all types of games Sam enjoys the more casual games while I enjoy the more hardcore games, but since we have that overlap we know where each other is coming from. This means you can expect HTD to target both casual gamers and hardcore gamers alike. It's a tough task to take on but we're up for it and with everyone's suggestions and ideas, along with our own, we feel we can merge the two successfully. We're excited and think it'll be awesome and we hope you guys do too!