Militia Defense (2009-07-17)

[Tabasco]

Yeah, I thought for a few moments about the bleeding vehicles and decided I could pretty it up later, maybe leave rubble instead of blood and so forth.

I also thought briefly about never ending waves, but I like the idea of there being an end. Ultimately I plan to have 50 waves.

New maps are in planning, in fact, if you want to unzip the love my sprites file for grass, buildings, trees, etc. is in there. Of course, I'm no artist and it's just 40x40 tiles on a 24x16 grid, so feel free to make prettier maps if you are so inclined. A quick look at citymap.lua will reveal my nasty map technique and should be pretty easy to generate. If someone just made map images where I could clearly identify where a travel path was, I wouldn't be opposed to creating the accompanying lua file for it. That image took me way too long to create, but again, I'm not an artist.

When I was making my initial design document I thought about the aerial units, letting your units take damage, and a number of other variations. I wouldn't rule this out for the future, but right now it probably won't happen.

You will also find a road block graphic in the love file that isn't currently used and a look at the source will show that enemy units have a damage stat. I didn't feel like making a real alpha solver so my plan is to implement destructible roadblocks so that if an enemy's desired path is blocked, they'll just stop and shoot at it until it's destroyed.

Squeamish are we? I like the river of blood effect, but it does need some adjustment so that it's not rendering on top of other units (only happens when a unit with higher array index gets killed while others of lower index are on the screen), and also I should probably limit it to the last few hundred units killed so that we don't eventually end up with thousands of blood sprites slowing things down and otherwise being redundant.

The info panel space is allocated and I even have some brief descriptions ready, but interface is boring so I keep putting it off. My apologies.

Thank you for the feedback. Now that it's playable and making noise I'll see about getting some more of this stuff implemented.

[Tabasco]

I really like the game! Though it does not fit on my old school 1024x768 CRT display

Does it work ok in full screen?
I've settled on 1024x768 as a 'safe' default resolution, but I didn't think about how it would look windowed. I've toyed around with scaling the map and so forth but I'm not comfortable with the result. I think the most reliable option would be to manually adjust the content to match the resolution and then switch resources as needed.
Is anyone else handling multiple resolutions?

[osuf oboys]

I really like the game! Though it does not fit on my old school 1024x768 CRT display

Does it work ok in full screen?
I've settled on 1024x768 as a 'safe' default resolution, but I didn't think about how it would look windowed. I've toyed around with scaling the map and so forth but I'm not comfortable with the result. I think the most reliable option would be to manually adjust the content to match the resolution and then switch resources as needed.
Is anyone else handling multiple resolutions?

Wouldn't the easiest solution be to simply make the entire game scrollable? In other words, when the player moves the mouse cursor or in-game cursor to an edge, add to the viewed location, clamping as necessary. Is there an easier way to do this than changing the coordinates of every body?

[Tabasco]

While that isn't a bad idea, the scrolling would drive me crazy. It's ok in an RTS with a big map where you have a minimap to navigate and it's sort of expected that you would scroll the battlefield, but here I think it's necessary to always have the big picture. It's also pretty easy just to make scaled graphics and implement a dynamic tile size. I'll need to adjust the gui for the lower resolution, but if I implemented higher resolutions I could just stretch it, so really once I have the dynamic tiles I can run a batch resize on all the tile graphics for any desired resolution.
This also makes me think it might be a good idea to adjust my gui framework to accept percentages as well as pixel values.

[rude]

Looks like I forgot to say that this game is pretty kewl. I'm a sucker for defense games.

[qubodup]

Hey, this is a neat game!

[Tabasco]

As requested, here's some clarification and further information about this game.

The sounds come from the FIFE free audo pack as well as PacDV
http://members.fifengine.de/corpse/Soun ... -06-05.rar -- MG, Rifle, Bomb sounds
http://www.pacdv.com/sounds/index.html -- Sniper sound

The graphics are self made, using GIMP, and covered under the MIT license along with the rest of the game.
I'm generally fond of TD games and felt like it was an appropriate genre to release another full game in. In any project I've ever undertaken, the greatest hurdle is content creation so I try to look for games that I can realistically produce material for.

Among my favorite TD games are:

Desktop TD
http://www.handdrawngames.com/DesktopTD/Game.asp

Element TD
http://www.kongregate.com/games/CasualC ... ement-td-2

This particular game was influenced most by this game:
http://alt.tnt.tv/tntoriginals/thecompa ... /index.htm

Presently I still have some balance issues and a bug or two to fix before adding more waves and options. As always, feedback is appreciated.
Thanks!

[Chris016]

Wow, this is a good game, Kinda short. But i think it is good. Cant wait to see more

[Skofo]

Pretty cool! :

A nice thing to have would be shortcut keys next to the buttons so you can easily tell what they are. Also, it froze on me when it lost focus.

EDIT: I beat it! Pretty easy.

[Tabasco]

Thanks for the feedback. Your suggestion was very easy to implement.
I'm shamelessly abusive to the CPU, so that might be why you had issues when it lost focus. The latest version adds a 2ms sleep in update.

The difficulty curve isn't very consistent and I usually see a huge amount of surplus money by the later waves.
I've increased upgrade costs and infantry hitpoints and may try sending 'hardened' units in future waves that have a multiplier applied to their hitpoints.