New Game Idea: Tower Defense

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rocifier
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Re: New Game Idea: Tower Defense

Post by rocifier »

Thanks guys. I have big plans for game-play for this new idea, so I've taken the graphics completely from the minimalist direction. So far I've got a significant part of the bg tiles done with only 19 unique tiles. And yeah okay it's a lot simpler than the other mockup - in fact there are only 5 colours. But I'm hoping this kind of thing will enable even more optimisations to allow for all the gameplay I want. I'll describe the gameplay in the next post since it's quite long, and I'm hoping when you guys understand it that you will be fine with these much simpler graphics.

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rocifier
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Re: New Game Idea: Tower Defense

Post by rocifier »

City in the Sky

A 2d tower defense. The goal of the game is to prevent enemies coming in from the left from reaching the right side.

Your main defense is to erect and upgrade towers which fire at the enemy. The enemy won't arrive at ground level for long. They will take to the skies reaching higher and higher as you fight off their every wave. Every tower must be manned and thus [blue 3x1 tiles] rooms need to be added on to house workers. On top of this, chimney stacks [2x1 tiles] need to be built and upgraded to provide the necessary power for every building in the city. All this costs money [pillaged from kills] and is a game of resource management and figuring out the right combination of upgrades or new towers. In real-time while monsters swarm your city from many trajectories.

City planning is an important aspect of gameplay. While the city must inevitably build upwards, you cannot simply stack a single narrow spire [1x3 tiles] forever. To reach past a certain height, you must invest in rather expensive foundations. These foundations take twice the land area [2x 2] and return no immediate gain for their investment. However, maintaining a city which supports itself and targets all levels of vermen is essential to ultimate victory. Don't neglect the bottom layers though, or the enemy may surprise even the quickest players with a ground army of renewed strength.

Multiplayer may be possible, with increased difficulty and shared management of the same city. The arrow pad will be used to cycle horizontally through each column and then vertically to select individual buildings or blank spaces above where buildings can be added upwards. I am hoping to construct a nice ui which assists in making it clear where the player can build and what can be built there (possibly indicating arrow fire range).
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Artcfox
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Re: New Game Idea: Tower Defense

Post by Artcfox »

That looks awesome, has a great description, and you have amazing artwork!
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Jubatian
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Re: New Game Idea: Tower Defense

Post by Jubatian »

I like the concept, both art and gameplay, it could prove to be quite interesting!

By the way although you have to be careful with your background tile budget, you can go wild with sprites and sprite animations as they are normal 2bpp images (so one byte produces 4 pixels, in sprite mode 0 shown on the demo, each sprite row is 8 pixels, so 2 bytes). If you want more horizontal coverage for sprites, then you could take a look at other sprite modes. If you would like, it also wouldn't be hard to remove RAM sprites (you won't need them if you plan to make a singe .uze file game, that is, not using the SD card) to make it a bit easier to locate the sprites (without RAM sprites you could use the full ROM address space for them, so you don't need to mess around with sections).
rocifier
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Re: New Game Idea: Tower Defense

Post by rocifier »

Jubatian wrote: Mon Mar 19, 2018 4:57 pm I like the concept, both art and gameplay, it could prove to be quite interesting!

By the way although you have to be careful with your background tile budget, you can go wild with sprites and sprite animations as they are normal 2bpp images (so one byte produces 4 pixels, in sprite mode 0 shown on the demo, each sprite row is 8 pixels, so 2 bytes). If you want more horizontal coverage for sprites, then you could take a look at other sprite modes. If you would like, it also wouldn't be hard to remove RAM sprites (you won't need them if you plan to make a singe .uze file game, that is, not using the SD card) to make it a bit easier to locate the sprites (without RAM sprites you could use the full ROM address space for them, so you don't need to mess around with sections).
For my case it would be awesome to remove RAM sprite support since I'm not planning to use sd card expansion. Would that need to be another customised mode though?
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Jubatian
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Re: New Game Idea: Tower Defense

Post by Jubatian »

rocifier wrote: Tue Mar 20, 2018 1:13 am For my case it would be awesome to remove RAM sprite support since I'm not planning to use sd card expansion. Would that need to be another customised mode though?
Customized, yes, but it is a simple change if done quick: it just needs replacing a few instructions with NOPs, I will do that for you this afternoon (so you will see it tomorrow).

If you decide you don't need horizontal scrolling, that could also free up some HBlank time, likely enough for an additional bullet (Originally a previous iteration of the mode which only had RAM sprites had a compile time flag to do this, I just omitted it in this for myself to make it easier to program it. But now that the mode is basically complete I could re-add this feature).
rocifier
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Re: New Game Idea: Tower Defense

Post by rocifier »

Jubatian wrote: Tue Mar 20, 2018 6:20 am
rocifier wrote: Tue Mar 20, 2018 1:13 am For my case it would be awesome to remove RAM sprite support since I'm not planning to use sd card expansion. Would that need to be another customised mode though?
Customized, yes, but it is a simple change if done quick: it just needs replacing a few instructions with NOPs, I will do that for you this afternoon (so you will see it tomorrow).

If you decide you don't need horizontal scrolling, that could also free up some HBlank time, likely enough for an additional bullet (Originally a previous iteration of the mode which only had RAM sprites had a compile time flag to do this, I just omitted it in this for myself to make it easier to program it. But now that the mode is basically complete I could re-add this feature).
So I'm kind of confused about the sprite + bullet count. The example has 129 independent bullets, but the sprite mode documentations seem to describe defining 5-10 bullets. Is that a lower level implementation using sprite chains? It seems like that is the case, and that for mode 5 you are indicating the bullets are stored interleaved with the regular sprites.
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Jubatian
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Re: New Game Idea: Tower Defense

Post by Jubatian »

rocifier wrote: Tue Mar 20, 2018 9:57 pmSo I'm kind of confused about the sprite + bullet count. The example has 129 independent bullets, but the sprite mode documentations seem to describe defining 5-10 bullets. Is that a lower level implementation using sprite chains? It seems like that is the case, and that for mode 5 you are indicating the bullets are stored interleaved with the regular sprites.
What the documentations describe are maximal possible amounts on a single scanline. Both the sprites and the bullets are chained lists, so you can have any number of them, the limitations apply for one scanline.

When you are using the new sprite mode 5 and have things as default (m72_bull_cnt being zero), you can have at most 8 sprites and 1 bullet on one scanline, sprite slots 0-7 and bullet slot 0 will display. You can add as many sprites / bullets to these slots as you want (Y ordered), but only one of them will display on a scanline (if the next element of the chain has an Y location equal or above the previous element, then the chain ends, no more sprites / bullets display on the slot).

If you can recall the Commodore 64 and it's VIC II, this is somewhat similar: sprite count per scanline is limited by the hardware architecture (of the VIC II), but by appropriate programming, you can reuse the sprite slots to display more sprites.
rocifier
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Re: New Game Idea: Tower Defense

Post by rocifier »

Well, made a start on the game :D Doesn't look like much but joypad movement to navigate buildings is mostly done, as well as the area size and partial scrolling. I can't get the light pink background from the mockup from the palette, but I was thinking later on I could alternate it with (probably) white each frame to fake lightening it. But I'm still not 100% sold on the mockup colours though, so for now I've picked a full alternate palette and I'll stick with it for most of the development.

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Artcfox
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Re: New Game Idea: Tower Defense

Post by Artcfox »

Looks good so far!
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