When I started this project, my idea was to explore a combination of tower defense with moving towers. The moving towers were going to be multiple cars, circling a base and shooting at the incoming enemies.
As I develop this idea, I find that for it to work properly (if it will ever work at all) would take a good number of different vehicles, powers, enemies, and other game elements, which would probably take a long time to develop into an interesting strategy game.
At the same time, driving around trying to avoid an evergrowing crowd of hungry zombies, since it takes a basic skill, quickly becomes fun. Take a look at this second gif:
Following this, I will abandon the original idea of making a tower defense game, and make a car-based roguelike, a Mad Max meets Vampire Survivors sort of thing. These are the changes I did on the prototype you folks have been seeing until now:
The player drives the car around (instead of it following a pre-defined path);
Zombies swarm the player's car (instead of targeting the base);
Zombies punch the player's car, and the car takes damage (instead of the base).
These rules change and redesign the game's core loop to look like this beautiful thing:
In this redesign, there's one game object that kinda loses its role. Can you guess which?
If you said "The base," you are right!
I'm thinking of using the base for two things:
If the player's car gets too far from the base, a countdown will start, killing the player when it reaches zero;
The player will need to carry supply boxes, which will appear on the map, back to the base. Maybe these boxes heal the car? Maybe they add new powers to the upgrade deck?
I'm still not sure what bonus these boxes could grant, but having collectibles that spawn randomly on the map is a good incentive for the player to roam the map and not stay only in one place.
Well, that's it for today! I'm pretty excited about this new direction, and I think you folks will like this better as well! I'm still not sure when I'll have a playable version of the game ready, but as soon as I have it, I'll upload it here!
See ya!
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