Splinterlands Tower Defense Dev Diary - January 1, 2023

January 1, 2023

It’s the Year 23 after the second millenium. Welcome, welcome! We hope you spend some of the time in the days (and dark nights) ahead battling the Nightmare Realm fiends with us.
Tower Defense pack sales are moving moving moving. You may want to stock up before the Alpha of the game comes out early this year and there’s a rush on sales.

Where We’re At

• Working through the first set of fiends, all of whom are minions of the Royal Reaper.
• All Towers are now working in a rough way. Just need tons of tuning, animating, and special-effecting.
• We have smart AI for Fiends to walk by each other and take up various sides of the road, allowing them to spam you and overwhelm your defenses with a huge attack involving tons of 'em at once.
• We have the first bunch of levels running smoothly, with a few nasty fiends tuned to tough to squash.
• Our first draft of Music is in and we think you’ll like it, if you’re a fan of spooky and dreamy tunes lulling you while you smash wave after wave of enemies.
• We have a truly working game engine that is rough, but is a TON of fun already. Towers and spells can be placed and you can watch the fiends get destroyed (or run you over).
• Our level designers are using the tool to begin to tune and create levels. Making them balanced enough to be fun and involve some special forethought involves tons of play, tweak, and replay. Playing games so hard is tough, but someone’s gotta do it!
• We’re cleaning our final UI and aim to have a game that top members of the community can play with in the next few weeks.
• Music and SFX is CRAZY cool-sounding.
• We’re putting together a simple but clear First Time User Experience (what we in the business call a FTUE - “Fatooey”) to guide everyone though how to set up towers, what spells to use, the powers of various fiends, etc.