I was going to do a more adventure type game.

Now, feces to that. It’s time for a TOWER DEFENSE GAME. TOTALLY ORIGINAL.

Now here’s what our main character was going to look like. I know, it’s utter crap, but it still took me like an hour.

I’m so good.

Hello my Ludum friends,

After about two weeks of development, Dusk Software is ready to announce our October Challenge game, Aegis!

Aegis is the in-development title of our upcoming tower defense variant. Gameplay focuses on deck building between maps to prepare and setup which towers and effects will be available in game. Cards are acquired through in game currency awarded at the end of maps as well as drops from boss creep.

While the game isn’t close to being done yet, we have put up an alpha build on our website and added a donation button. We’ve already received well over $1, so I figure that it counts.

Here is a heavily cropped screenshot of our Paypal account page as proof:

Here’s a link to the Ludum Dare entry page. And I’ve got an embedded video right here:

(Yes, I know everyone hates Vimeo, but YouTube just makes a giant mess of my lovely pixel font.)

Dusk Software consists of:
– Me! (fydo)
– Ken
– Ted

As always, thanks a bunch Ludum Dare!

Rise Of The Owls

It’s a TD game that takes place inside a tower. You will enjoy it if you learn the hero abilities! It’s fairly easy to win (though sometimes it seems insane) once you know how, but to get a high score requires great skill and daring.

win32 version: Click On Me (1.12mb)

If it doesn’t work for you, you can try the command line argument “opengl” to run it in openGL instead of DirectX. Probably won’t help, but hopefully it works anyway!

Can’t show a screenie since I am currently working on the offline computer, the only one with decent art programs on it (stupid Vista won’t run PSP9 or Max5).  Thusly, what I am doing now is art!  I’ve got lots in so far, though endless hours spent doing it.  Six in fact.  Still need some stuff for the buttons you click on and the title screen, and the treasure the owls are stealing, then I guess art is pretty much done.  Then I’ll need to get some challenge/point/structure to the gameplay, and some sounds.  That should pretty much do it.  I’ll need more heroes than I have to reach that point, but I’ll just reuse my existing art for those, because man, I’ve made a lot of little heroes.  I think about 8 unique characters.

I wanted the game to include a skill tree for boosting all your heroes, but I think that’s something for later.  You’ll have to be content with the strategy/luck involved in which heroes you get.  Not much luck needed at this point, since the pool of heroes currently is the same as the number of rooms at the inn, and you’re allowed to have multiples of the same.  I want to change that, but can’t until there are a whole lot more heroes.  Which probably won’t happen by the deadline.

So I’m off to do that.  I’d also like to have more than one kind of monster, but that too will have to go by the wayside.  Hordes of ordinary owls is interesting enough for now!

Progress on all fronts simultaneously (except art and sound).  This shot depicts the Inn Menu open.  As you can see, many of the bunks are occupied with clones of Archie the Archer, since he’s the only hero in the game.  The cursor you can’t see is on one of them, eliciting that handy tooltip that describes him.  At the top of the tower is a vast collection of invaluable treasure.  Hidden behind the row of bunks, you can just barely see that the owls now have life meters for your convenience.  Every few seconds new heroes come to the inn, and ones leave, giving you an endless array of heroic selections.  Of course, they’re all Archie right now.

I guess the next step is to let the owls steal the treasure.  They drop it when they die right now, but I don’t actually know that, since they can’t pick it up in the first place yet.

I felt like I picked up some speed, here is something remotely playable: http://enedahl.com/ld12/incomingfodder01.html

Going to bed now. Oh, the music is just a placeholder, a demo .mod file.

Well, by “game” I don’t mean something you can play.  But it is something you can watch as all the (temp art, in case there was any doubt…) elements function as intended: the owls ascend the stairs and even descend again if they reach the top.  The archer as you can see fires arrows at them.  He can even kill the first one before they get past him!  The excitement is palpitatious!!  Things are going well, I think, though I am dreading the actual real implementation.

My game is this: tower defense, inside the tower itself.  Eventually, there will be a pile of gold that the owls are stealing at the top.  You of course strew archers, chefs, and yetis about the tower to stop them.  The twist is that instead of buying generic units, you buy specific heroes as they show up visiting your inn (so a random element to that).  So you might dump Archie the archer after a while for Blog the barbarian.  The end goal is something with 100+ different guys (some not too different, like an archer who does more damage or fires faster than another), and a lot of wacky variety.  Don’t think there will be 100 of them by tomorrow, though.

Im going for a Tower Defence with resource and upgrade trees.

Title screen working, and filling the screen with towers works also.

LD48 #8.5 was an unofficial competition with two themes: Moon, and Anti-Text. “Moon” was actually some insanely long thing about how you’re looking at the moon and suddenly realize it’s an alien spaceship or something, but we just called it Moon. So I created probably my favorite of my own LD48 entries, Moon Invaders. There’s no text whatsoever in the entire game, which makes reading the manual rather necessary, since it’s a strategy game. It’s basically a tower defense game, but instead of monsters following a path, they descend Space Invaders style. I greatly enhanced this game post-compo, working obsessively for a week. I just like it!