So, here we go.
DevLog Entry #001Let me start by telling you what I want to accomplish with the game.
I have 3 main objectives:
1) To make the forest ecosystem a living thing. Where the extension and location of every plant and grass patch you grow has an impact on the forest "ecosystem". I want creatures to interact with each other and with the environment.
2) To give many different solutions to levels depending on how the player wants his forest to be. You could focus on fairy plants and have an enchanted carnivorous plant-ridden forest or focus on wild plants and populate it with the strongest beasts.
3) To capture the essence of Tower Defense games while adding some platformer action.
So, let's see now what we have so far in the game.
Energy Types:The MC can tune herself to magical stones that are scattered across the forest to charge herself with magical energies. There are 2 types right now, the Wild Stone and the Fairy Stone and each tunes to its appropriate energy type.
The stone you're tuned to determines the type of grass and plants you'll grow as well as the properties of your aura and shots.
Right now we have:
Wild Energies:
-Grants a slight protection against attacks.
-Its shots are the strongest ones.
-It grows Wild Grass, the basic grass type which spawns pixies and forest animals.
Fairy Energies:
-Grants protection against magical attacks.
-Its shots are weaker but slow down enemies on impact and have an area of effect(AoE not done yet).
-It grows Fairy Grass, a magical grass that turns pixies into fairies and slows down and weakens enemies.
There will be a third energy type which comes from tuning to a Dark Stone but it's not implemented yet.
Plants:Plants are Forest Defense equivalent to towers. To grow them you need to spend magical energies on a fertile soil tile that is covered with grass. These magical energies are collected by catching different fey beings such as pixies(wild), fairies(fairy) and gnomes(dark).
There are many plants to choose from and they all come from an unique combination of grass + energy type. For example, if you spend wild energies on a wild grass patch you'll get a Pixie Bush. But if you were to spent fairy energies on a wild grass patch you'd get a Thistle Bush intead.
Then you can also upgrade or customize some of these plants by spending more energy on them.
You can see some examples on the following list:
wild grass + wild energy(10) = pixie bush
pixie bush + wild energy(20) = pixie hive
pixie hive + fairy energy(30) = fairy fortress (not available yet)
wild grass + wild energy(10) = thistle bush
fairy grass + fairy energy(10) = guardian flowers
guardian flowers + fairy energy(5) = dart shooting flower
guardian flowers + wild energy(5) = carnivorous flower
For more information on the plants and creatures that currently inhabit the forest check this page:
http://forestdefense-game.blogspot.com/p/plants-and-creatures.htmlWell, I guess that's enough for an introduction.
Now the last things I worked on(not available on the demo though) are:
-Thistle Bush: (ex berry bush): A plant that turns pixies into redcaps and enables the spawning of lynxes from wild grass.
-Redcaps: A more aggressive version of the pixie that deals more damage to enemies but damages the player when collected for wild energies.
-Redcap Cocoons: If a redcap absorbs enough fairy energies from a fairy grass patch it will turn into a Redcap Cocoon. Unlike Pixies', Redcap Cocoons never open and instead stay on the ground acting as mines.
-Optimized Pixie code to improve performance.
-Tuned difficulty progression.
So that's all for the first entry.
Oh, in case you don't know the artist responsible for most of the graphics you can see in the game is no longer in the project. So now I'm doing all graphics and animations myself and everything is taking longer to get finished...
If anybody knows of someone who would be interested in working with me on the project please let me know. My budget is very low right now but we could go for a 30%/70% of what we earn with the game.
Thanks for reading!
Okkwogg
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