Tower Defense

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I don't know about you, but I kind of like the Tower Defense games; they're easy to pick up and involve quite a bit of thinking. On a side note, I've got this secret, killer game idea deposited on my organic hard drive (read "brain") since 2005 or so. I am dreaming at a 3D tower defense game where you place your defenders using a regular top view, and then you engage in combat using a 1st person camera, running from one defender to the other, healing your soldiers, repairing the towers, fighting the enemies and so on. Now that you know my secret idea you'd have to pay me royalties of up to 70%, but I feel so generous today that I'll let you use it for free :). See, I've told you that game concept ideas grow in trees...

 

Back to our game: the player starts with 100 gold pieces and 100 shield points. Click the "Build" button to create a defender, move it where you want it to be placed (there's a white sprite showing the exact location) and then press the left mouse button to place it; press the right mouse button to abort the creation of the defender. Since a defender costs 40 gold coins (a steep price, considering the global economical crisis) you can only place two defenders at the very beginning, but each dead enemy adds 10 gold pieces to your funds. Place the first two defenders carefully, and then use the new money to build more and more defenders, trying to prevent them from reaching the exit - if this happens, you'll lose 10 shield points for each enemy that manages to escape and if your shield goes down to zero the game is over.

 

aum96_tower1

 

The enemies move faster and faster, are tougher and tougher to beat and are created in larger and larger number with each attack wave. You'll get quite a few gold coins by killing waves after waves of enemies, but at some point you won't be able to buy defenders anymore because you can't place a defender too close to another.

 

aum96_tower2

 

The picture above shows my level in the middle of the 10th attack wave, indicated by the little number on the top right corner of the screen; as you see, I've got quite a bit of gold but I can't place many more defenders. The actual level walls were created as an mdl file; this gives you the ability to design all sorts of complex levels like canyons, etc in your favorite modeling application, and then import and use them into Gamestudio, provided that you create an enemy path that works fine with your level, of course.

 

The code is very well commented, as always.