There isn’t a working wave system yet, so it’s just an endless monster rush. Waves will be the next thing I code, followed by a little additional monster variety. Then I want to make the UI prettier and more comprehensible. After that I’ll add a few different boards and work on the ugliness of the background art. (I had a half-assed grass sprite, but a half-assed grass sprite is literally worse than nothing.)
Once that’s done, I’ll have basically a working game. But it won’t be one that addresses the problems I have with Tower Defense.
I played a few TD games at the suggestion of people interested in the project. PixelJunk Monsters does something interesting to get around one of my main problems with Tower Defense. Instead of upgrading and placing towers from an omniscient point of view, in PJM the player controls a little creature on the ground. He has to run around building the towers himself, upgrading them, and collecting coins left behind by dead baddies. This gets around the “not doing anything while I’m playing” problem of TD quite nicely! But I feel that it does so by making the problem of a positive feedback loop even worse.
When I try to explain that a positive feedback loop can be a real problem in games, sometimes people don’t understand. The two terms used for this are “positive feedback” or “reinforcing feedback,” and both of those sound like good things. Why wouldn’t you want something called Positive Feedback? I remembered an article by David Sirlin that used the term “slippery slope,” and this does a better job than I did of explaining why the “kill things to get coins to build towers to kill things” feedback loop can be bad. It is the thing I absolutely want to kill if possible.
Right now, I’m considering taking a more Lemmings-like approach to the creation of towers. Instead of earning coins, you earn individual specific towers as new waves start. Your goal is just to place that tower in the best possible position. To solve the “I’m doing nothing” problem, I think fairies will get tired as the game progresses. So the player maybe has to click them to rejuvenate them, replace them, or bring them some kind of resource to keep them active. There are, I’m sure, TD games out there that try both of these tricks. But it’s been said that part of the point of FTJ is we’re supposed to be “ignorant of the genre.”
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