Aura TD

The most polished part of this game, the music, was composed and recorded entirely by Bruno Vacherot.

This was my first self-contained game. After working though a tutorial series provided by Brackeys, I wanted to sit down and create. My goals were:

1. Create something from scratch, without relying on generic assets.
2. Create a game concept that was at least somewhat original.

Tower defense games generally have a few common design elements that I wanted to break down:

1. There’s a progression from weak to strong towers over the course of the game.
2. Some towers are simply better than other towers.
3. Towers often behave very similarly.

I started out with the concept that you’d have a single base tower, and then other towers which would add attributes to the tower, like multiplying attack speed, range, or damage. The attributes would be themed roughly to elements or something like that. This worked out to be kind of boring, since:

1. All towers ended up behaving similarly. They all fired the same, they all filled the same role.
2. The dominant strategy usually worked out to be to stack the same modifier on one tower.
3. There wasn’t anything interesting to discover. Combining different elements didn’t lead to interesting behaviour. It wasn’t cool.

So back to the drawing board. I decided to make a few changes:

1. Attributes no longer stack. A tower either does, or does not have the attribute.
2. Attributes are more abstract than elements. Elemental powers are an overdone trope at this point, and they don’t add any clarity as to what they effect.
3. Combinations of attributes create entirely new towers. Instead of adding a modifier like “attacks 2x faster”, I changed the behaviour itself. This allowed me to add disadvantages as well as advantages to each tower independently.

This created a much deeper design space. At around this point, the project was dragging on, so I settled on creating the 8 possible towers, and then wrapping the project up. If I were to continue working on this, I think I’d make the following changes:

1. Add clearer explanations of what towers do. The explanation right now is hacky and unclear.
2. Rebalance some towers. There are clearly better and worse towers.
3. Increase the size of the map. The small space favours towers that have a shorter range, and makes delayed effects (like damage over time) less valuable.
4. Implement a similar attribute combination system to the enemies. Examples of modifiers include: increased speed, health regeneration, armour (which would take a fixed amount of damage, but be ignored by burn effects), and linked health (where all enemies would share their health pools). This would further increase the size of the design space and give room to incentives more variety in towers.

Anyways, I doubt I’ll come back to this. It was a good project to learn Unity a little better and actually release something, and I appreciate all of the people I shared this with who gave me feedback, criticism, and support.