Play the game here! http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-25/?action=preview&uid=11391

I had another fun and busy weekend pixeling and making a game. This time was much more interesting than usual though, I made a sideways tower defense, and I have never made a game like that before. Frankly, at first I wasn’t even going to make the game about this idea, fearing I would not have time to make it, but then I thought, whatever, at least it will be an interesting learning experience.

I’ve had this idea of a psychopathic princess killing heroes for a while now, but I’ve been just waiting for good time to start making it. Then it turned out that the Ludum theme was You Are The Villain, what an excellent chance to finally make the game!

What went right:

– Finished the game on time
This was real close call, I spend perhaps a bit too much time with the graphics again, and lots of time was spend just making the traps and enemies behavare correctly. I only finished the core mechanics near the end and all 8 levels were designed in hurry with just two hours left before the deadline. I also should have started making the graphics to the 16×16 tilesize like they are in the finished game from the very beginning, when I first started making the game, the characters were much bigger, but I soon realized it takes too much time to make and animate their sprites, so I instead started to remove pixels and made them as tiny as I could. Here is some before and after comparisons, I think the smaller ones look much better anyway. I can’t draw big characters. At all.

Before and after

– Made a good tower defense!
Like I said, I have never done a game like this before, in fact, this is my very first game that is not a platformer. I am very proud of myself. At first I wasn’t going to go with this type of game, but I decided to take a risk and it paid off. Considering how fast I had to learn everything and put the thing together, I think it turned out pretty well and I am glad the feedback has been prettypositive too so far.

What went wrong:

– Number of levels

I had only two hours left to make some playable levels, so it’s no wonder some of the levels are bit poorly balanced. I also didn’t have the time to add any kind of help or tutorial texts to the beginning of the game. Currently you just have to read the game description. I was aiming to finish 10 levels, but it would have taken too much testing, so I had to go with 8, but that’s pretty ok number too. Also All the levels turned out to be the same tiny hall, with lots of unused empty space underneath it. The reason for this was that I simply did not have the time to start designing more complex levels like in alpha design picture:

– Enemy balance.

There are 3 types of enemies in the game: Regulars, who are basic walking and attacking knights, Agiles, who can run ridiculously fast and can walk past road blocking traps, and Brutes, who are slow but very powerful giants. Plenty of people have said that the agiles are bit tough to deal with as they take no damage from spike carpets and reguire either arrows or carefully placed bombs to be taken cared of. I haven’t really heard anything said about the Brutes, but I personally think they should have showed up a bit more and perhaps be a bit more stronger, they are pit of a pushovers currently, there is a weird bug that makes them slide down hills when they punch things.

– Trap balance

I didn’t have enough time to properly test the traps, so I am not entirely sure if the prices are balanced enough. Also the final Chain Ball trap turned out to be bit useless, it costs a lot, moves slowly and breaks way too fast. I really should have boosted it’s spinning speed and HP. Also the game gets a bit easy if you just buy lots of crossbows in the later levels, the wall trap doesn’t get much use either, it should probably get a boost in HP to be truly useful.  There was also supposed to be 6th trap but I didn’t have the time to make it. Well, I didn’t really even have any ideas what it could have been. Perhaps slime that slows the enemies down when they walk through it?

Traps of Mad Princess

Disregard of what went wrong, I think the game turned out pretty well anyway, at least this is a good foundation to start building something bigger and better, maybe an improved post-compo version with better levels and more balanced gameplay and fixed bugs? Mobile version? We’ll see, I’m especially interested to see if I can turn this mobile. That depends on how stable the new beta of Stencyl 3.0 is.