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[TheBlackMask]

In Engineer you take the role of a lone engineer against a horde of zombies.  You really aren't that powerful so you have to rely on fortifications.  Turrets are expensive but are your only hope in later waves, while walls are cheap and can be used to redirect zombies.

Screenshot

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I'm really bad at the whole balance thing, so I'm having difficulty with...the...difficulty.  Any help in tuning the game logic to make things more fun is appreciated.  And yes, I am aware there is no sound.  I was planning on using sfxr for some sounds but it decided to stop working on this comp.  Any feedback is awesome, thanks!

[Cymon]

I like the premise. I'll try to remember to check the game out tonight.

[badpoet]

Nice idea The towers seems to do less damage than me, which is kinda weird considering they are my only hope. In the later waves I found myself running and shooting back, and it was hard to find time to collect the coins. You could add more kind of enemies, with different health, speed and maybe intelligence factors (avoiding towers, finding the fastest path). Also, weapon & tower upgrades, and more time between the waves.

[Potatoe]

Can the zombies sap your sentries?

[Sam]

I too dig the premise!

I found hammering the fire buttons to be painful.  Maybe let us hold them for a reasonable rate of auto-fire?  Personally I'd prefer aiming and shooting with the mouse, but that'd change some of the dynamics a bit.

Not quite sure how to show it as the game is currently set up, but having a preview of where my wall/turret is going to appear would be nice.  Again, I'd be pleased to have them placed with the mouse, or maybe just dropped wherever you're standing.  Also maybe snap their placement to a grid, to avoid overlapping walls and generally ugly constructions.

The walls seem a little insignificant.  I guess they're cheap, so it's right for the player to need to place lots.  I can't really manage to do much useful with them, especially as they fade out quite quickly once a couple of zombies have brushed against them.  I'm not sure what to do about that.  Bigger walls?  More interesting shapes for walls?

I think maybe Left 4 Dead has spoilt me with hordes of easily killed zombies.  I'd enjoy having more enemies attacking at once, which die to fewer bullets.  I imagine a sea of zombie guts with a few coins floating around after each wave.  Stealing some pacing ideas from L4D might work, too: A constant trickle of zombies and occasional INSANE RUSHES (which get larger and more often as the game progresses) to make you break a sweat.

Finally, a little bug:  Press 2, then 1.  The turret is displayed on top of the wall.  The wall should have vanished when you pressed 1.

Good luck with it!

[eddietree]

+1 for Robotron

[Alex Vostrov]

Interesting idea, I think you could develop it into something special.  It has potential, but there are some issues as well.  My impressions are based on the first few waves, since I can't survive for long.

• The difficulty curve is brutal, you need to think of ways to introduce new players to the game
• I suggest giving the player a health bar so that being touched by zombies is not insta-death.  This will make the game less frustrating and more forgiving
• I had an issue with selecting a turret and then selecting a wall.  If I turn off the wall, I still hold the turret, but I can't build it
• Make it so that holding a shoot direction automatically keeps shooting, mashing keys is kind of annoying
• One thing to think of is better buildings to build after you survive longer
• One possible problem is that players will tend to fortify a small area of the map.  This is a bit boring, since it wastes all the empty map space.
• One thing to try to address the above is to randomly drop power-ups into the empty areas of the map.  The player then will have to balance the risk of getting the powerup with the reward.  You'll probably have to make them disappear after a while.

[Nitro Crate]

Oh wow, I'm actually designing a game with a very similar idea, i'll be sure to check this out.

[acidBatterie]

i liked it, yeah, it was brutally difficult and button mashing became tedious but i still liked it. hell, the only thing i really didn't like was the difficulty in selecting between items.

[Glyph]

Actually on about wave 100 right now... I've been letting it run just like that. That is, of course, a problem. I can explain this and map the difficulty curve.
DC-
      ---
     -   |
    -    |
---     |
         |
         |
         ---------------------------------
The difficulty is brutal at the start. You can place 2 turrets (because for some reason your money can go all the way down to -7) but then you just have to fire. Turrets will BARELY pay off for you, and the enemy number grows, making a need for turrets. However, you reach a point where the number of enemies coming in stays the same. Here, all gold is surplus (because you don't NEED it, if you made it this far you can survive.. assuming you used a "many turrets" strategy) and you can just kill enemies and fortify. Kill, fortify, kill, fortify... The game's difficulty eventually drops to 0 when all enemies can be staved off completely by turret. The picture was really 20 waves farther than anyone should have gone. I just messed around and bought a LOT of turrets after a certain point. The reason why tower defense is so good is because it keeps you on your feet (Wait... Why did the enemies' hue shift? Agh! What is up with these things!?) and it always keeps original. I suggest a code to generate the zombies, other than perhaps a variable and an alarm 0 event. And crazy bursts in difficulty (i.e. a new enemy) when the game starts to get repetitive are advised and always fun.
Oh, and when you press into a wall you shouldn't get stuck. The guy needs a mask (not the one you put on).
One last thing... walls are useless. I never used one but since they go away I would never see any use for them.
I would love to see new abilities, items, monsters, and level layouts in this game.

[TheBlackMask]

Thanks for all the replies and enthusiasm!  Right now the source file is on my laptop, which is missing its AC power adapter, so I am not going to be working on this until that gets here in about a week.  I will, however, take this time to flesh out exactly what I want to do with it.  Based on all of your feedback, here are a list of changes that will happen.

- Shooting will be automatic, but significantly slower.
- Player bullets will do less damage than turret bullets, right now they do the same.
- Zombies will be able to destroy turrets, and some will focus on killing turrets rather than attacking the player.
- Walls will be much stronger.
- Pacing will be completely revamped.  I haven't played L4D, but I did look into it, and the slow trickle + insane rushes seems like it might be fun.  This, coupled with turrets getting destroyed should fix the difficulty curve dropping like it does.
- Object selection bug with 1 and 2 keys will be fixed.

I think once I change those things, the difficulty curve will be pretty fixed.  That is really the main issue I think the game has right now, and once these things are done, I can get to adding new enemies and ways to kill them.  Any suggestions on what kinds of enemies/weapons I should include?  I would really like to have some neat enemies, as the whole "mindlessly chase after the player" is a bit lame.

Again, thanks for all the feedback.  Having other people play it gives so much more insight.

[Glyph]

Ideas
Make certain new put-downable weapons/items unlockable. This will increase the overall experience and keep people coming back for more.
1.Ghost Gun - Fires through walls
2.Ghost Turret - turret version of former
3.Shield - protects you from 1 hit. maybe(?) effective when stacked
4.Heavy Blaster - Does heavy damage. Low recharge rate.
5.Wide Blaster - Large or split shot weapon
6.Ghost Zombies - Walk through walls
7.Newer, better, faster, stronger, bigger zombies
8.Cursed Zombies - Like to destroy turrets/items
9.Light Gun - Heavy damage to "ghost" type enemies
10.Red Zombies - Come back to life if your engineer doesn't touch them after they're dead
12.Lifeless Tower - Stops the dead(er) from coming back in its range
13.Life Giving Tower - When you or an enemy dies in this area, they are brought back to life. The (visible) range goes away to recharge
14.Doom Zombies - Get rid of your ability to be brought back to life when touched by one (don't hurt when not doomed, kill when doomed. Go away after touching)
15.Armed Zombies - Where did they get guns at? Who cares!
16.Zombies need to drop 1-3 pieces of gold, with 2 being the norm
17.Money needs to go away after a while, else lag will occur
18.Time Break - Halves the timer's speed
19.Zombies MUST appear ON the ticking of 0 of the timer, not about 3 seconds after when they finally enter the room.
20.Unexpected Zombies - Don't take the closest path too you, but instead take their time (in the main creation code, 1/5 or so probability of having this attribute)
21.Changing of level - The layout of the level needs to change during the fight - maybe a hole can get blasted open and zombies can start to come from the top/bottom?
22.Ideas for how to unlock items
22A.See/Kill all the enemies
22B.Create x amt of turrets
22C.Create x amt of walls
22D.Don't grab gold until wave x
23E.Grab x gold before wave y
23F.Survive past wave x

Bugs
Player shouldn't be able to go outside of room
Does gold still go to -7?

Crap, I can't resist ideas... and long posts 

[Ryx]

Bugs:
Pretty much all of them have been mentioned except the fact that the turret shoots where the zombie IS, not where he's moving, so they miss. A lot.

Also, you have no mask for the player from what I can tell so he skips around if his feet touch a wall. Fix that. (Just make a mask for the player sprite so the animation doesn't mess with the collision detection)

Also the graphics are really, er, not great, but they work for an early alpha/beta and I'm not a graphics snob so I'd probably play even if you kept the graphics.

[letsap]

I noticed all the bugs above, too, so work on those first.

Powerups dropped by enemies would definitely be good. Something like lives/health, maybe a higher value coin every now and then. Also, just fiddle in sfxr for sounds, it'd add a lot. A cooldown between waves is also good, so you can collect coins and set up more turrets. Also, place a limit on how many turrets you have, giving the option to destroy a turret somehow.
Perhaps a more obvious way of setting them up would be nice, such as displaying the turret type next to a number, when you're holding it show something like "Hit Space to deploy!" On that note, make building multiple turrets easier. Something like press a number to toggle that turret being on, and hitting space to build it.
Other than that, to prevent gameplay from being monotonous, have different maps, more enemy types, such things. Oh, another thing: You can shoot in all four directions at once which can be pretty unstoppable and unfair.

Little flaws aside, this was fun to play. With some more polish it'll be a classic.

[TheBlackMask]

Because the mailman was too lazy to  try and deliver my laptop charger more than once, and I was too lazy to go get it, I am resuming this game a little bit later than I thought.  But, rest assured, I am still very much dedicated to improving this game.  Thanks, everyone, for all the bug reports and ideas.  Expect a new version within the next couple days.

[Ryx]

Still waiting for that update..

[TheBlackMask]

Engineer has been updated.  You can download the new version at the same download link in the original post or (here).  This is not the huge game changing update I had planned for, but it does fix the issues that made the game seem unpolished.  The next update will focus solely on the difficulty curve and that aspect of gameplay.

Here's a list of changes:

- Fixed movement.  You will now slide along walls instead of the jerky stopping movement.
- Fixed player mask.  Animation will not affect collision.
- Modified shooting.  Keys can be held to repeatedly shoot.
- Fixed selection.  Pressing the 1 and 2 keys when selecting items is no longer weird.
- Fixed money bug.  Money no longer goes to -7.

[Ryx]

I really don't like the new movement, it's not precise enough to maneuver around zombies.

[Galaxy613]

Good game, definitely needs work though.

I would suggest a proper main menu, being able to pause in-game, and a map editor or at least multible maps.

[TheBlackMask]

Thanks, I will be waiting for the game to become more of a full game before I add a real menu system.  I was actually thinking that maybe instead of a level editor, it would be neat to totally do away with the premade levels.  What do you guys think of a system where all walls in the level are placed by the player?