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[Live Aliens]

Frayed fields is a strategy game. I originally starting making a tower defense game. But it evolved into much more as I added more features.

Unique features

• Towers have weight and various ground types can only support so much weight. You can put the tower where ever you want, but your tower will be damaged if placed on ground that can't support it.
• All the tower are built by you, with a few exceptions. You find random parts while playing the game and uses these to build unique towers. Allowing you to build light towers with minimal shielding to heavy tower with maximum shielding.
• There are 13 different shot types and the shots can affect some aliens in unique ways.
• Towers must be manned by a gunner. You can have more towers than gunners and use transports to move gunners between towers. Towers without gunners just sit dormant.
• If you have plenty of gunners but not enough resources you can use tower transports to move towers around the map.
• The weather can affect the map. On some levels there are lakes and rivers. When you playing these maps when there is a heavy rain it can cause flooding of the map. Damaging towers in the flood plain.
• Gunners have default orders. But you can issue orders to individual towers. Such as always target the strongest alien or always target the nearest alien to their target. By default all towers target the alien nearest them.
• Crystals are collected from aliens and can be used to cause additional damage (or heal) the aliens. For example, a green alien gives you a green crystal. Green crystals heal green aliens, but hurt pink aliens. Pink crystals heal pink aliens but hurt green aliens. There are eight different colored crystals.
• Boosts can also be collected in the game and added to towers. Boosts can provide different things such has greater damage, lighter weight, greater range and more.
• Aliens don't just move across the lane, they fight back. Well some do just move across the lane, but others can fire back at the towers, disable the towers, explode near the towers, become invisible or wear crazy amounts of shielding to protect other aliens.

Alpha play test thread.





Website
www.livealiens.com

Snow Map


Lava Map


Grassy Field Map


Tower Creation Screen


Level Intro Screen


Tower Options Shot

[Live Aliens]

Here is one of the unique towers, the Confusion tower. This does not cause damage, but confuses the alien, making them go backwards for several seconds. This tower is good for making the aliens ping-pong in front of other towers.

[Live Aliens]

I have a small trailer below showing some of the above maps. When I have more done I will upload longer gameplay videos.

[Live Aliens]

So what is in this screen? This is the tower dialog screen, to open it you just click on a tower on the field. On the left side are your target selection and stay selection options.

Target selection allows to change what the tower shots at: closest alien to this tower, the closest alien to the exit, the strongest alien, the weakest alien or don't shot at all. Why none at all? Because some shots could heal an alien and you may not always want that.

Stay selection is when it decides to check the target selection. Until dead means once an alien is selected the tower fires at it until it is dead. Best selection means the tower will fire at least once at the selected alien and then determine if it is still the best target.

The icons on the top right are (from top to bottom) the weight of the tower, the max weight of the land it is on, the range of the tower and the damage dealt. If the weight of the tower is greater than the weight of the land max the tower will get damaged. The greater the difference of weight the greater the damage given over time.

The decommission button destroys the tower. You get the gunner back, but not the materials or crystals.

Finally, the crystal buttons at the bottom. This allows you to add crystals to the tower. The top number on each is the amount on the tower, the bottom number is how much you have. The crystals are based on contrasting colors on the color wheel. I use 8 colors so colors 4 places apart are opposite. If you add blue crystals you will heal blue aliens by the damage amount (heal by 4 in this case), if you add the contrasting color, orange, you will increase the damage dealt by the tower (to 8 in this towers case). And yes a mouse over show the color name, for those who have trouble seeing the specific colors. The colors are blue, cyan, green, yellow, orange, red, pink, purple.

[Live Aliens]

I have finally added a alpha build for you to try the game out:
http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=42150.0

For more detailed game play info:
http://www.livealiens.com/www/?page_id=100

[Live Aliens]

Frayed fields will have a variety of levels, to help prevent monotony of level types.

Level Type 1
Your standard TD level, you must prevent the creeps from reaching a target, that target may be a base or just the other side of the screen.

Level Type 2
In these levels you must keep all the creeps alive for a specified amount of time, don't kill them and don't let them reach the target.

Level Type 3
These are collection levels, instead of your goal being to defeat X number of creeps you must get X number of resources collected before you are overrun by the creeps.

Level Type 4
Boss level, this will have a static creep (the boss)on the screen that you must defeat, without running out of resources. The creeps will be attacking your towers, therefore exhausting your resources as you rebuild them.


Other ideas? I am open to hear your opinion on this.

[ndke]

I'm wondering why no one has replied to this devlog (yet).
Your game looks great so far, but to be honest, I don't think the level intro screen fits with the graphics style of your maps...

[billyboob]

I'm wondering why no one has replied to this devlog (yet).

I would have earlier but I'm waiting for a reply to this question in the playtest thread of the game.

[Live Aliens]

@ndke, thanks. I agree about the level intro screen. I am still thinking about what to do there. I really want to show the planet, but it looks out of place with the wallpaper background. It looks good with the star background, but then it doesn't really fit as you mentioned.

[Live Aliens]

Old intro screen for reference:


New level intro screen.


What do you think?

[ndke]

Looks alot better than the old one, I like the new intro screen!

[Live Aliens]

Each tower can have crystals applied to each shot. There are eight colors of crystals to go with each of the eight colors of the aliens. You collect crystals when you destroy an alien. To increase the damage to an alien you want the opposite color. You want to use purple crystals to hurt yellow aliens. However, the same color crystals heals. So a purple crystal heals a purple alien.

To make it so you don't have to memorize all the pairs the UI will have the opposite crystals stacked.



I am still debating if eight is to many.

[Live Aliens]

As I have mention Frayed fields is somewhere between a tower defense and an RTS. It originally started as a TD game but I have added other management aspects that more it towards being an RTS. Here are some of those:

Towers
In a tower defense you typically buy your towers with some sort of currency and you can have as many towers as you can afford to buy. I am going a different route. Throughout the game you collect tower parts from downed enemies, but not all enemies. You use those parts to build towers. These are the towers you get to use and you can only hold a limited number of towers (currently at 48). The towers are reusable and stay with you until destroyed or you decommission them. Any damage done during a level is erased when the level completes and it starts fresh on the next level. As you progress you will get better parts to build better towers. So management of parts comes into play, you will need to decide if you want the lighter but weaker parts or the stronger and heavier parts. See below for reasons why.

Weight
Another aspect I wanted to see was limiting tower location based on weight. Each tower has a weight which is determined by what parts it is made of. Each land type can only hold so much weight. If the tower is less than a lands max weight it is fine. It the tower is heavier, then it will incur damage from settling and shifting. If a tower gets enough damage it is destroyed. The placement cursor is colored to indicate safe (green), orange(damage will occur), red (cannot place at all), tower weights and land max is also shown to allow the player to determine the risk.  The gunner inside the tower is lost when the tower is destroyed. The damage incurred is proportional to the overage. Towers that are only over by 1 or 2 units over will get little damage and last a fair amount of time. A tower that is hundreds of units over will receive significant damage and not last long at all. Towers are precious and you want to save them.
 
Resources
Each tower requires resources to operate and maintain on the battlefield and there are 3 different types of resources. Gunners, each tower requires 1 gunner to operate it. Axstinium, each tower requires this as the source of power for the tower. Materials, all the stuff needed to deploy and repair a tower (this does not include the collected parts, which are needed to create the tower). You will have a fixed number of gunners and Axstinium to start with. In later levels you will have collectors and barracks to get more Axstinium and train more gunners. Materials are collected from every enemy destroyed in the level. You can deploy a tower without a gunner, but it will not operate.

Transports
Since you are limited on towers you can move towers or just move gunners between the towers. The number of transports you have will depend on your player level. You can move towers to another spot, but this is slow. Or you can built lots of towers and move gunners between them. It is much faster to transport a gunner than it is to move a tower.

Tower management
As mentioned previously in this thread, you can control the aiming logic on each tower. You can also apply crystals to change alter the amount of damage done by the tower.