Design discussion: the famous twist!

[akien-mga]

As we said, we want to make a boring tower defence, but with a twist! (like all tower defence basically :p).

The were some very good ideas on the pad, and we mostly settled on @fry-'s one:

Twist: It's maybe a bit egoistic, but I like my idea the most :P Enemies that break through 'infect' a tower (the one first in the line) and make additional enemies spawn. Infection will take like 60sec or so before the tower gets back to normal.

If we all agree with this gameplay element (I find it pretty cool personally :p), we need to discuss its implication both on the logic and graphics:

• What happens when an enemy reaches the "base"? How to chose the tower that would get infected, how look would it be infected and how would it behave (mob spawner? how many enemies/min, how strong, etc.)
• What would show visually that the tower is infected? Particle effect, specific sprite, etc.?

[alketii]

I like the idea too, but I'm not sure if its good for balance.

Let say you don't have a very good defense, an enemy gets inside "Nexus" and a tower gets infected with 10 other enemies, those enemies will quickly enter the "Nexus" and infecting other towers, it will be a domino effect which crushes "The Empire" 🎱

[fry-]

@akien-mga about your questions (if we go with this idea of course 😝 ):

• I would make the far most away tower from the base (direct or map-path distance?) the infected one. if this one is infected, then the 2nd most far away, and so on. I would do it that way so the enemies that get spawned there have to walk the full distance across all functional towers (chance to kill them for the player). Also I would let it spawn one enemy every X seconds (depending on how far the current game is evolved or what tier unit gets spawned, decrease X)
• I would definitely make some sprite that overlays the tower. maybe something like these organic eggs / cocoons This would not fit to the steampunk / sci-fi tier though, so maybe we make different sprites depending on what kind of tier gets spawned by the infected tower? particle effects could be added too, to make it look more natural :)

@alketii yeah this balancing issue I was thinking about too. I think it's not too big a problem if you know about it and build one tower far away from your base (that gets infected) so you win time to kill them besides next wave. also, you should not be totally broke and get money while killing new units, so you should be able to build up new towers for defense. also we could make some "last hope" field abilities that can be bought besides towers. I mean one-time effects like "drop bomb" on the map which deals damage to the current units there. Or "disinfect tower". Optional we could make these abilities not buy-able but automatically charging, like it takes 5min to load up energy, if its loaded its on hold until you activate. after activation it takes 5min again to reload before next use.

[bojidar-bg]

Ok, here is a bit different idea, what about having many nexuses, and having enemies infect them, thus becoming new spawn point. Probably, there should be some way to reclaim the base though...

[bojidar-bg]

Here is another proposal:
The player can build villages/towns/cities (with upgrades similar to towers), which would provide living room for people. Only then one can build towers, since each tower requires some people to run it, in addition to the resources used to build it. (Potentially, tower building time might be lowered when there are lots of idle citizens.)
The twist will be that enemies would target settlements built by the player, destroying them when they are reached. If the player has less citizens than required for the towers, one or more of the towers will become inactive until they build more settlements.
For additional hardness, maybe the destroyed settlements would become ruins, giving passing enemies some protection from damage.