New Dimensions to TD Gaming

[frerich]

Hi,



first of all, thanks to you folks for creating an awesome tower defense game. I've been playing all kinds of TD styles since the Starcraft maps made this style of game famous. I really enjoyed playing through Defense Grid and it was nice to discover how much care was taken when balancing the towers. Thumbs up! I also like the idea of having the creeps steal items (cores in this case), unfortunately that idea didn't seem to make much of a difference during my games; there were barely any "hand overs" between the aliens.


Anyway, the reason I'm making this posting is to suggest a few new features. I'm sure you people thought about most if not all of them already but maybe bringing this up makes you reconsider. ;-)


<ul>[*]It would be interesting if there were more ways to create synergies between towers. The "Command" tower is already a good start - maybe there could be a helpful guy somewhere who lets you cast area-of-effect spells like shields or auras or anything like that on your towers. That might make entirely new tower setups interesting![*]I think it would be nice to have more passive elements in the game, like traps and the like. Things which the aliens can walk over/through (so the traps can be put on their path) but which don't attack the creeps themselves:
<ul>[*]it would be fun if you could construct metal poles along the path; they might be used to increase the number of hits done by the tesla chain lightning (so the chain might go "alien 1->alien 2->pole->alien 3->alien4".[*]or there could be fire traps on the way which set aliens on fire the moment they walk over the trap[*]Or maybe you could establish some sort of portal which has a "magnifying glass" effect; multiple laser turrets would make use of this portal and shoot into it, and a large bundled ray of laser light then hits the enemies (so that it's more interesting to have laser turrets close to each other).[/list]
[*]It might be fun to have an "assimilation mode" or something, which roughly works like the "Line Tower Wars" maps people played in Warcraft 3: in this mode, you can send creeps yourself, trying to conquer the enemy base and surmounting his defense grid. Each creep which was sent gains you a certain amount of credits. Such an "offensive" mode might be interesting for a sequel, in which the home world of the aliens is attacked. ;-)[*]It would be fun to have enemies of different size. This way, you would have even more control over how the aliens move around since you could fork the way through your maze: one half of the fork is very narrow, so only small (presumably cloaked and/or fast aliens) will take it while the other half of the fork is wide enough for the largest alien to pass. So you could decompose the waves into different kinds of aliens and then take care of them individually.[*]Now that I'm writing it, another idea which just came to my mind: it would be fun if you could create "magnetic zones" (maybe using an "aura tower" or the like). No alien which has a shield will take a path through this magnetic zone (since it might depolarize his shield and whatnot, I'm sure you come up with a good explanation ;-)). So you could also split the groups into those with a shield and those without.[/list]


Just some food for thoughts, it would be much appreciated if you could let me know what you think. :-)

[jeff]

Thanks much for these ideas, there are many unique ones here that may or may not be similar to things we are thinking of.* We greatly appreciate you taking the time to write all this up!





Jeff