TOWER : Devlog 02 - Do not spill coffee on your computer

August first, my hand met my coffee cup in an awkward angle while I was working at home on my personal computer. Result : I spilled my whole coffee on my laptop and it died right there. After a week of hope waiting for a call from the computer’s hospital, I finally receive the news. At 6pm on August 8, I went out of the hospital with a small zip lock containing my dead PC’s ssd.

Anyway, that’s the reason why I did not update the project in three weeks. I have now a new computer running on Linux Fedora 40. I wanted to see if I could continue to make games on a Linux distro. We will see.

For this build I:

- Improved the pathfinding I need to add actual obstacles for this to be really visible. The enemy’s path is computed using a A* algorithm, it was really fun to implement it.

- Reworked the visual assets Some assets such as the spawn points or the range circle of the towers were unpleasant so I reworked them. I also vectorized this tilemap template which I use for whiteboxing the layout of the level. I also added a damaged feedback on the enemies which turned out to be a much needed feedback after I added the next feature.

- Added a shield mechanic I might have put the kart in front of the cows here (That’s a french expression, I don’t know the equivalent in english but you get the idea) cause I felt like having a character moving around managing towers was a bit shallow. I wanted to find a way for the player to interact more with the enemies. At first I was gonna give them a sword and let them attack the enemies alongside the towers. That was an obvious interaction to add… So I decided to put a shield instead. Now by holding the right mouse button you can prepare a shield and place it by releasing the button. This shield is not taken into account by the enemies pathfinding who will get stuck, giving more time for your towers to destroy them. Right click again and the shield is now removed.

Because placing a shield means for the player to stay still, it is important to prepare the defences correctly and use this ability to defeat stronger waves.

I also designed the level to be beatable with only two towers by using the shield appropriately.

That’s all for this week. Because the GMTK game jam is starting tonight I probably wont be posting about TOWER for another week.