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[Bones]

Name fairly undecided
You can download it HERE

A very simple tiny side-scrolling Castle/Tower Defense game or a very basic automated RTS.



Buildings:
Fortress -  Construct and research foot troops (protect the castle can be repaired)
Garage/Factory - Construct and research vehicles
Airbase - Construct and research air-units



Units:
Soldier - Long ranged, slow rate of fire
Heavy Soldier - Medium Range, strong defense, rapid-fire
Pyromaniac - Short-Ranged ground troop
Spy - Invisible troop evades ground troops (cant be seen without a ward tower)
Priest - Converts troop units and heals allies
Jeep - Momentum ground unit - Plows units at full speed (weak against fire)
ATV - Fast ranged ground troop (weak against fire)
Helicopter - Medium speed air-unit, shoots at air or ground.
Jet - Fast speed air-unit, shoots air units.
Bomber - Slow air-unit, drops a big bomb.



Towers:
Beam Tower - Shoots at opponent buildings
Turret Tower - Shoots ground units
Missile Tower - Shoots air units
Wall Tower - Blocks any tower shots (can be repaired)
Shield Tower - Creates a bubble shield that can block bombs

[Sean A.]

I have a soft spot for these types of games and one thing I always thought would interesting was if there was a helicopter or jeep that didn't hit ground units but acted more like a transport, so when it runs out of health it deploys like 5 guys from it. Looks good though.

[JMickle]

i've wanted to make a side-view towerdefence for a long time, and this looks cooler than what i had imagined.

[Bones]

Yea, I've noticed this is a very very small genre, there aren't very many games that use this mechanic.
I've seen a few but I can't list any really good ones off the top of my head.

More ground action!
One way to give points/cash is via unit kills.




Need to decide how I will disperse the global.money
Right now I have created a middle resource which you want to have control over as it gives you money per over time.

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[Bones]

This video is actually rather boring, as watching an auto-mated game can become boring, watching everything being automatic is super slow but the battle is neat to watch which units gain a skirmish advantage at which time of the game.




If you'd like to try out the game you can download it HERE
It's still a bit buggy and things are still a bit un-balanced but its still kind of fun to play if you like this sort of thing.

Air units are a bit over-powered obviously, and being that the enemy is pretty basic its not too hard to push.

[Chris Pavia]

Gameplay-wise there doesn't seem to be much reason to ever look at the bottom half of the screen, since everything you need is in the upper right and left corners.

Obviously the bottom half is much more exciting, so it'd be cool if you could build the player interactions into it more.

[cosec]

I really love the dark style you've got going here with the art. But like Chris Pavia said there's alot of unused screen space so I would suggest moving the ground up a bit so you could have more room for interface stuff down below and then leave the sky clear. I also think it would be nice if you moved all the troops up so they were silhouetted against the sky.

[Bones]

@Chris
Okay, I think I have fixed the problem of staring at the top of the screen.
I have added a macro function which I'll explain in a bit, as well as the ability to toggle your units creation on or off.

I do agree that the player needs more interaction, somehow.
I've seen games such as Plants vs Zombies or Revenge of the Titans, which you need to actually click on the gold, or gem refinery to collect cash.

But I'd like to think of a better way to do this, the ground vehicles are going to have more interaction as you will be able to tell them to stop; personal transport vehicle is inbound as mentioned by Sean.
Repairing buildings, and researching units all takes place at ground level, so the eye really is moving around more now of course as with any RTS once your stacked, you pretty much win.

@cosec
If I lowered the ground or raised the ground, more ground isn't really great.
I've tried it, it feels weird, and the GUI overlaps the units when it is on the bottom of the screen.
Raising the ground simply to put the GUI down there has more cons than it does pros.
All the air units are silhouetted on the sky (the background gradient will change) the camera can move up to see more sky, rather than down to see more ground.

The new build macro is as follows
1,2,3,4,5,6
Q,W,E,R,T,Y


Originally I had the units all tuck nicely into the corner and move as you created units.
Now they just get placed into their correct macro slots for visual knowledge of what buttons to press for which unit. (as seen above)


Other tower/castle defense games include a man-controlled turret or "arrows" which the player can upgrade.
But I wanted to avoid this as I couldn't think of a way to do such that wouldn't be over powered.

This worked for mouse control as it was all nice and neat, but since you can now press buttons and auto-create toggle the units I figured it was best to change it.

You can toggle a unit by right clicking on the unit icon this also displays the unit's information.
Clicking the icons still works, but it's not very efficient when you could be using all all your fingers on the available macro's, as sometimes it's nice to turn off toggle and wait for the cash to roll in.



All the buildings have drop down menu's which can be accessed by clicking on them, from there you can research which units for a fee. This default menu in game maker freezes the game, but I don't care enough about this game to try any harder to make a menu that doesn't.




@cosec- also the unit's y position is randomized in creation so they do appear over the sky this just makes the units seem less linear.

[dumbmanex]

How about being able to assign "stances" to selected units, where you slightly change up their behavor and stats.  Like the soldiers just for example, they could be aggressive to speed up movement and fire rate but drop their max hp by 1, or go defensive, slow down a bit, gain a hit point, maybe they tend to bunch up near the map middle and stop advancing.

[Bones]

The demo has been updated on my FTP
You can get it here.

You can now toggle foot troops to "Halt" or to "Go"
Left click will set halt any units your mouse hovers over.
Right click will set go for any units your mouse hovers over.


Blue outlined soldiers are toggled to Halt (all foot soldiers behind the selected unit will stop)

Along with the new halt code, the Walls now stop enemies

If the enemies line gets full they will push right through your wall.
Otherwise they damage it over time and you can repair it for a price.

[BadgerManufactureInc]

Looking good man!

Cannae' believe there are so few of these kinds of game seeing this 

[Chris Pavia]

At the moment there doesn't seem to be need for strategy of any kind while playing the game. The enemy seems to keep spamming the basic soldier ad nauseam, forcing the player to do the same. Does the enemy have the same amount of resources as the player? They seem to be able to create 10 troops in the time it takes me to create 3 or 4, and don't seem to have a monetary resource limit like the player.

Personally I'd like it if you can get rid of "money" altogether, and focus the gameplay more on the troops and the fight itself, instead of base management. I don't play a ton of RTS's for exactly that reason though, so maybe I'm just not the target audience.

[Bones]

Really it's rather tough to add strategy to these types of games.
I can see why any previous titles were also rather boring, and just unit spawn fests.
Such as...







Castle War
Street Gang Wars
Army Wars
Medieval
Defender Chronicals
Zombies vs Aliens Warfare
Dark Lords
Age of War
War Evolved
King Arthur's World

Basically all this research has done is tell me not to use the word "War" as a title for anything
Most the reviews of all these games end up saying game play gets boring, spamming units gets tedious, sound effects get overplayed.

Should the enemy have a limited resource?
That would just mean that if you held out or got the upper hand in your first play through you would just wipe them out and the game would be over.
As I only intended to really have one level within the game.

As soon as you spawn 1 or more unit the enemy begins to attack.
The enemy spawns in counter opposition to you.
- If you build 2 or more towers (they will spawn Jeeps to smash them down)
- If you construct an airfield they will attempt to spawn opposing anti-air units
- If you build 25 or more soldiers or have 3 or more buildings (they will spawn Pyromaniacs)
- If you spawn Pyromaniacs, they will spawn Doctors who convert low HP enemy Pyros, and Soldiers.
- If you spawn a spy the enemy wont know you have a spy until it either takes over the middle point, or if your spy is revealed the enemy will then spawn Spies.

I'm not particularly sure how to break down what the enemy spawns into waves or anything like that.
I could try giving the enemy limited resources and see how that works out, but I'm pretty sure it will just make winning that much easier.

[Chris Pavia]

Take the following with a grain of salt, as the aspects of the game I see as fun could be completely different that the aspects you (as the designer/developer) see as fun. I haven't played many of these types of games, although I see that as a good thing because I'm not bound by the genre's cliches.

For me, the actual fighting between the troops is the most interesting, as it is the best indicator of my progress vs the opponent. Action is more fun than inaction. Managing base-building and troop production drags me away from that. I'm not saying you shouldn't have it, only that it should be simplified. Kind of like when Dawn of War came out, and greatly minimized a lot of the resource-gathering that was a genre-defining element of RTS's at the time. The outfitting and balancing of your squads took on a much bigger role then, because the player had more attention to give it.

So maybe I could give simple commands to groups of troops?  As an example, "Hold this ground" makes the selected troops immobile, lowers their attack slightly but greatly improves their defense. At the moment, troops seem to get killed after a hit or two, which makes them seem more like cannon fodder than anything else. Do opposing troops stop moving to duke it out when they are in attack range (I'm at work so I can't load up the game atm)? It would help promote the feeling of a pitched battle if the battle lines between sides were more clearly defined.

I definitely sense the spark of fun in the game, though.  It actually makes me want to make one myself! But obviously fun is subjective, so feel free to ignore me

[simono]

yes, very cool!

works fine with Wine under Linux btw

[simono]

For me, the actual fighting between the troops is the most interesting, as it is the best indicator of my progress vs the opponent. Action is more fun than inaction. Managing base-building and troop production drags me away from that.

I enojy base-building just as much as fighting and turtle players might like it even more.

But yeah action is good too.