Hello, C2 community!
This is a project I made for the Riot Games API Challenge (a contest where participants create any piece of software that utilizes their API), so a lot of the game assets are related to League of Legends. However, I want the game to be accessible to anyone, even those who are unfamiliar with League of Legends. Although the contest is already over, I've been constantly updating the game and have been tweaking it for about a month now.
This is my very first game and I am mainly struggling with the numbers, namely trying to balance the scaling difficulty of spawning enemies and the towers' power as the game progresses. The game involves an exp system in which towers can level up and grow stronger, and the spawning creeps grow stronger based on wave number as well as their stats, which goes into more detail in the game.
Here is the game: blackmarketdefense.bitballoon.com
The gameplay is a standard tower defense in which a player constructs towers on the higher ground to wipe out the spawning enemies. There is another component to the defense gameplay where the player spawns mercenaries to fight against the spawning waves directly in the path. All of the towers, mercenaries, and spawning creeps are generated based on game data from another game (League of Legends) and the waves are sorted such that stronger waves spawn with higher wave numbers. This aspect of the game is purely for utilizing the Riot Games API, and for those who do not understand, is not important, except for the fact that each generation of towers, mercenaries, and waves has a random mechanic.
That being said, this game mostly showcases implementing data into game. The whole process is that an XML file containing data for each wave, namely the towers, mercenaries, and creeps, is used to generate each wave.
If there is anything confusing or unclear in the game, please let me know.
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Additional thoughts on the current state of the game:
Because of the lack of ability to upgrade towers, the game currently encourages building many towers. Alternatively, you can convert the gold into tokens and choose to build an army of mercenaries instead, but their DPS is not nearly as cost efficient as those of towers, so this is not a viable strategy at the moment. I am still working out the numbers, so the power balance of towers and mercenaries is still due to change.
Due to the "build a lot of towers meta," I believe it would be better to allow the player to maze with the towers instead of having set walls where the layer can place the towers. I am planning on creating a second map where the player can do just this.
I am open to new ideas instead of sticking with the current system of leveling with experience and not being able to upgrade. I considered allowing the player to purchase a 'level-up' for towers. I may consider ditching the level system altogether and just letting players upgrade towers individually. Currently, the game play is pretty stale due to lack of options on what the player can spend gold on.