HTD Day 5

Alright, it's Tuesday and time for another HTD update! Let's talk how we're going to implement offense and defense into HTD.

As we all know traditional tower defense (TD) games typically revolve around, as the name implies, defending. While this is fun and all it's also a bit limiting. When you start adding RPG elements to this system you begin imagining scenarios where you wish you could also attack. So why not add it? I'll describe some such scenarios to better illustrate what we have in mind.

Okay first let me just give some relief to the TD purists. There WILL be traditional TD levels, just not ALL of them. You'll still have your towers (heros) with your base/candy/etc (thing to defend) and all you'll do is defend against waves of enemies, just like the good ol'times. There will most likely be both versions of this as well. For example in some TDs (like PTD) the enemies have to make it to your candy and then return back with it. In other TDs the enemies simply need to reach your base and cause damage to it. I don't see why we can't just have both.

So having said that I've always thought it was kind of lame to have boss enemies simply be tougher units with maybe 1 or 2 special abilities that do exactly same thing as the other units. With RPG elements at your disposal you can do so much more and RPGs ALWAYS have awesome boss fights, which brings us to attacking.

Bosses are just one example of where we can use offense. Suppose you just finished working through a dungeon (each section would be a level with a TD set up for example) and now you face the boss. In this case he's defending his own thing (phat lootz most likely) and so you'll need to approach and attack him in order to get his treasure.

Some bosses may be stationary while others are mobile. You don't want the boss to start beating your casters to a pulp by either getting close to them or targeting them from a distance. So in order to do that you'll need to move and attack with the right units (melee/tanks) to keep him distracted. Just like how in PTD you can move units to different locations there will also be locations near the boss. Of course this puts you right where you'll take the most damage so you might not be able to stay there the whole time and have to swap different units in and out.

Now since we have both pure defending and pure attacking scenarios there's really no reason you can't have a situation in which you have a mix of both. What if there's a boss with little minions that are attacking you and going for your base/candy/etc at the same time as you're trying to defeat him (hint hint). It doesn't even need to involve a boss really, there's plenty of ways you can have defense and offense going on at the same time from both sides.

So to conclude, levels in HTD will vary from pure defense to pure offense to a mix of both which we think will keep things interesting and allow us to do much more with the game. And to finish it off here's an image showing some side angle frames from an attack animation that Kevin worked on:



Concept sketches and actual art with armor

As always give us your feedback in the comments and let us know what you think!

-Dan