Game: Tower Tower Defence Defence

Play it here.

Towers do all the work in TD games. But who will defend the defenders themselves?

A recursive tower defence game we made for Ludum Dare 48, whose theme was “Deeper and deeper”. We’ve competed in other game jams too, but this was our best showing yet! I had a good feeling about it because already during development I found myself stuck playing the game instead of actually coding. The game manages to strike a good balance between tried-and-true tower defence mechanics and a fresh mind-bending recursive twist.

The game also has an interesting technical aspect: the way the path generation works is simply that the start and end tiles are chosen and then a random walk begins from the start tile, until the end tile is reached or there is nowhere left to go. If the walk doesn’t reach the end or is below a certain length minimum, a new walk is generated. This is a Las Vegas algorithm that succeeds often enough to be efficient, and it’s simpler to code than an algorithm that always produces a valid path.

Credits

(Also see Ludum Dare page for links to peoples’ profiles)

• Honza @Aeternall (dev) – also props to him for coming up with the game idea!
• Petr @petrroll (dev)
• Bety @Lavialee (animation)
• Vojta @DrCuketa (game balance)
• Vašek @IAmWave (dev)
• Ondřej Trhoň (music)

Additional help:

• Bouča @Colanderr (testing, bugfix)
• Chugg, Wark, Babkis, Sharpblade (testing)