November 3rd 2022
Hello Splinterlands! We hope your Halloween was excellent, and your bounty of candy was calorific and plentiful.🍬🍬🍬 Hopefully you saved some room though (personally, we're candy HODLers) because we have some great treats to share this week.
Tower Defense pack sales are still going strong, we’re well on our way to the next airdrop already. Be sure to grab a few to help everyone reach the goal. (Spoiler: It's worth it.)
Where We're At: Design
To over-simplify, the twin steam-trains 🚂 🚂 of our design effort are rolling along two tracks:
The game and level design team are trying to come up with creative ideas for towers, spells, and fiends that feel familiar but also have some play mechanics you've never seen before, even if you're a huge Tower Defense fan. They are also working on a system for the way game maps can be built, with criss-crossing paths, special entry/exit zones, how towers can be placed, and how we can make each map not only feel fun but feel strategic and each like different puzzles to be solved -- depending on the type of fiends that we let loose along the pathways.
Meanwhile, our crazy-yet-ingenious art team is coordinating with the game designers, coming up with visuals for the towers, spells, and fiends that match the design parameters and stats we've assigned them, while also making them look juicy both as NFTs as well as within the nightmare universe of the game. Building out the art in a way that shows up as spooky-beautiful but also clearly articulates what the unit does is a real effort with a lot of re-work and re-re-work.
Where We're At With Development
Our level editing and testing tools are coming together nicely, with the engineering team trying to stay a step ahead of game design and providing them with all the tools they need to be dangerous. A lot of back-end work is necessary to come up with a data structure to hold all of the stats for all the various units, across all the levels.
Coming Up
Ultimately we are pushing hard over the next few weeks for a full "level design" tool to allow us all to internally test real levels across different scenarios and make sure the towers, fiends, spells and heroes feel balanced, with no level being impossible, but also one that needs a "just right" mix of NFTs and strategy to defeat.
With 25 towers, 25 spells, dozens of fiends and maps, across multiple leagues and rules of battle -- well, we're keeping busy. 🤯
Game Art
Here is a sneak peek of an upcoming tower. Be sure to keep an eye out 😜 for the full tower art coming soon.
