Kaleb Eberhart
Gameplay Designer & Producer
TowerCraft Defense
Overview
Collect resources throughout the world and use them to create various foundations which you will craft and stack tower blocks. Defend your village from an onslaught of golems who will steal your resources and run off unless you stop them and reclaim what has been lost.
Crafting
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One of the unique features of this tower defense game is it's exploration into vertical space. Players must craft a foundation and from there they can stack as many tower components as the foundation can support. Crafting allows players to get creative with balancing their resources by adding or removing individual units. This ties into the Resource Management section below.
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To give beginning and casual players a chance to feel at ease during the wild chaos of a wave, time is slowed down when foundations or towers are being built, upgraded or sold. This also grants advanced players a chance to comfortably multitask tower actions and concocting their next moves.
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Foundations create the range for the towers to be effective in. Foundations made from rarer resources give better ranges and tower heights. Consequently the same resources produce towers with stronger effects. The stacking allows players to experiment with damage outputs, strategic attack patterns and buffering. However they must think ahead as tall towers can block other projectiles from reaching their targets if they are obstructing the projectile path.
Resources and Management
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Resources must be collected by hand, providing players something to do other than crafting towers and watching the machine go. This gave players a sense of agency in the world and allowed them to feel like they were a part of the world rather than simply watching from above.
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Resource replenishment can occur in various ways. Some are renewable and some are limited without player intervention. Players have to balance land space available to allow for resources to reappear so that they can continue to build or prepare for a difficult wave that will surely deplete their health.
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It was important to communicate to the player what parts of the environment are interactable. I utilized something to catch player's eyes further reinforced by a highlight that only occurs when the mouse hovers over the object to further reinforce that interactable objects have the same visual behaviors.
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Player health being directly tied to their resources forced players to think differently about crafting. Resources had added value and no longer seem expendable. Players who anticipate losing resources can set up defenses so that they may reclaim resources before they are lost. With health being tied to objects, players experience one last wave of adrenaline if they have to fight to recover their last stolen item as the possibility of a game over is much more tangible.
Tower Management
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While the function of upgrading and selling tower units and foundations exist, allowing players to place and remove individual resources grants a new depth of strategy to building towers. Players can reallocate resources to better balance their defenses or when in a pinch, sacrifice some of their health to survive a wave that has gone down hill so that they may survive to the end of the wave and focus on collecting more resources.
