Splinterlands Tower Defense Dev Diary - December 1st 2022

December 1 2022

Major week of work. We've accomplished a LOT overall, but also some unexpected challenges that have caused us to revisit some of our base assumptions and rework some of our logic from the ground up.

Tower Defense pack sales are moving at a strong end-of-year clip. Makes for great stocking stuffers!

Where We're At

[X] All of our main UI screens for desktop and mobile approved and ready to pass to development of a full-featured alpha. A sneak peek:

[X] The process of creating towers, spells, fiends, heroes, and other troops is underway and on schedule. Each requires going from sketch to full color to rigging for animation to massaging and delivering to the development team.

And spells require some cool visual effects to wow the player and also show clearly what is going on:

[X] The game engine is fully working for all key tower attributes and fiend types. Often with LOTS of placeholder graphics!

But despite these great gains, sometimes game development feels like two-steps-back, one-step-forward. As an example, we're playing now with the bounding boxes around fiends, towers, and heroes -- the logic of the back-end game engine, when applied to the graphics on the front end, sometimes results in weird visual glitches such as Heroes who block paths while trying to fight fiends, or fiends that are doing melee battle with a Hero at too far a distance to look realistic. We had to rework some of the physics of battle and rules of attack to make things mesh.

Game development is a real team effort. Sometimes a small assumption or change made by the animators deeply affects the base stats of a unit in a way that really messes the game algorithms up -- or vice versa. As a team, in addition to trying to over-communicate, we do a lot of playing together, arguing points good-naturedly, and explaining things across disciplines... When a problem that seemed intractable gets cracked by a clever idea the whole team shares in the accomplishment -- it's a fantastic feeling and a huge part of why we love game development.

In Progress

On our plate for the upcoming week:

• More work on the unique tower types and trying to make each tower is really interesting and has meaningfully better yet balanced stats when they are Leveled Up.
• Making sure every spell is completely clear and works with the engine but not too weird or over-powered.
• We've begun work on the music and Sound Effects to make the game really come spookily alive.

As always, we appreciate your feedback, ideas, and love!