Fuck This Jam! – First Entry

Like many game designers from around the world, I am participating next week in Fuck This Jam! This is a game jam with a week-long duration and one simple rule: you have to make a game in a genre that you hate.

Conveniently for me, I hate a type of game that seems to come together well in game jam environments. I fucking hate tower defense.

Why the hate?

I’ve broken this down before, but, in detail, there are two highly scientific reasons:

1. Tower Defense is The Anti-Flow. Flow is the concept of increasing difficulty in games. The better you’re doing, the harder you have to play to keep up with how the game responds to your skill level. In an ideal game, your skill level is matched by the game so precisely that you need to continue to concentrate to rise to the increasing challenge.

Tower Defense does the opposite of promoting flow. The better you’re doing, the less you’re actually playing. If you have a perfect tower setup, you’re just watching. Some smart people, like the folks at PopCap, fixed this by giving players some additional busywork to do during the tower defense scenario. This adds something, but doesn’t defeat the underlying problem.

2. Tower Defense creates a Positive Feedback Loop. In a standard bug-squashing game, a player gets “coins” for each “bug” killed by a tower. The coins are used to buy more towers. If the player does a poor job early on, and tower setup isn’t good, the player will get less coins. Therefore, the player won’t be able to afford better towers. So if a player starts playing poorly, the player will fall behind, and play worse and worse until all hope is lost.

So, there you go: two scientifically proven game design reasons why Tower Defense is bad and you should hate it. Yet so many people seem to like it anyway! Why?

I realize, for one thing, that the amount of idle time in a TD game makes it ideal as a “windowed in the background” experience. If your towers are set up well, you can casually walk away from the TD game without much fear, checking it now and again. Not every game needs to be a flow experience. And I also realize that there are TD games that people play for the story. So if trying to create such a game somehow gives me new appreciation for what’s out there in Tower Defense, so be it. As I understand it, that’s perfectly aligned with the goals of the jam.

I’m not entirely sure it’s possible to make TD a flow experience anyway. When I pitched this concept casually to a few people, they thought of some ways to mix it up. One idea was to set the game from the point of view of a single tower, and aim and click at bugs. But that’s not really tower defense; it’s just a shooter. Another idea was to do a sort of reverse tower defense where the player controls the bugs… but I’m not sure that’s really Tower Defense either. I could do a sort of parody text-adventure Tower Defense where the player takes on the role of some dude in the tower and types SHOOT BUG tediously. I may save that plan as a last-minute backup if I can’t do much better.

But what I really want is a Tower Defense game that respects my time, the way Earthbound is a JRPG that respects my time. In Earthbound, if you are definitely going to win a fight anyway, you instantly win that fight without actually playing out the combat. So it should be in Tower Defense. If all my towers are properly set up, and victory is inevitable, why make me push down a Fast-forward button or otherwise go through the motions to watch it play out? If the towers are set up toward an inevitable loss due to positive feedback, why not let me know that now rather than slowly sinking under?

Does this game exist already? If not, are these design problems I can solve with limited coding experience? I plan to try to find out.

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November 7, 2012

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secondtruth

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4 responses to “Fuck This Jam! – First Entry”

Anthony Ortega

November 7, 2012

The tower defense games I’ve found the most interesting were ones that didn’t have a set level. You essentially progressed through a story which offered numerous levels with varying paths, enemy spawn points, and end goals. Unfortunately I don’t have any of them on my phone anymore and they’re buried in the app store so it would be damn near impossible to find them.

There was one mobile game that was set up like an rpg where the towers are really members of your party. They each had their own strengths and weaknesses, could be upgraded, and could be destroyed by the enemy waves. The mechanics didn’t change much but it was the fact that there was a narrative that kept me going. The game ended up being horribly unbalanced to so I stopped playing.

There was another mobile game where your towers were different types of dragons that were trying to protect their eggs. The unique thing about this is that enemies had to carry the eggs back to their spawn points. This, mixed with a fairly diverse and robust upgrade system, allowed for some interesting game moments. Again, the mechanics didn’t change much, but it made it so that you didn’t just setup an initial defense and let it go. You were always a little overwhelmed so that you could see your eggs being carried off which, in turn, made you choose how to upgrade your dragons and other special abilities effectively.

I agree with you in that standard tower defense games seem to break some standard game design best practices. But I would argue that they’re created for a specific niche of gamers. It’s almost an ego trip when you’ve successfully made a defense that stops all waves of enemies. In that sense, a tower defense game’s flow would come from multiple play-throughs as opposed to one sitting because the player is inevitably going to be overwhelmed for the first few play-throughs until they figure out their strategy.

Just my two cents.

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Amanda Lange

November 7, 2012

I think, both for simplicity’s sake and to test the boundaries of my idea, I’m going to stick with set levels. And I haven’t thought of a good “skin” for the game, but I guess I’m not thinking about narrative yet either…. I’m hoping that’ll evolve from mechanics.

Defense Grid did the variant where enemies also had to take a thing out of your base, and take it back along the path. I think its a good idea in that it lets you catch the guys you missed the first time. I’m also trying to think about things that will keep the towers themselves interesting. I got some good suggestions from Twitter already for this… I’m getting excited to start!

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Quinn

November 7, 2012

Hey, you pretty much nailed why I don’t like tower defense games, something I’d never actually figured out. I’ll be curious to see how your game addresses those issues – really cool idea for a jam, I have to say.

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M.joshua

December 5, 2012

This is a rad analysis. The criticism of Flow gives voice to the very thing I couldn’t put into works about TDs for me. The ones that tend to be the most fun that I’ve played are the ones that add CoD-style leveling structure to an action-driven avatar. So it’s a mash-up in that sense (Monday Night Combat, Dungeon Defenders, Orcs Must die). I’m not sure if that solves the positive feedback loop problem or just draws emphasis to the split layers of core gameplay.

Love the Earthbound reference (fav SNES RPG, btw) and the emphasis on honoring the player’s time.

I think that by pointing out the tactical victory, you’re kinda turning Tower Def into something more like Chess. And that kind of thinking gets me more excited about the potential results.

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