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[yetanothertowerdefensegame]

So Unity 2017 broke the NavMesh. AWESOME!!!11!! or Not. dundundun

Update Nov. 22 So I tried to test the navmesh on my office system which has Unity 2017.1 Pro and that god forsaken thing was working fine. So not exactly sure what the problem was on my lappy.

[yetanothertowerdefensegame]

State of the Game, Nov ‘17

So Mr. Fork Parker asks, “What’s the game up to?!?!?!?”

To be honest, that’s a good question. What the game up to? Let’s break down what I’m doing currently with the project,

Code Restructuring So when I started working on the project, I was not planning for a full game, it was supposed to be a small prototype-esque for whatever reason, but it did turned into a big ass working project, and to some extent, a proper game. The problem rose when I realized that lot of code related to AI units, Player Hero and its friends were getting duplicated because I forgot to plan the classes with proper design patterns before all this became serious. I’ve restructured most of classes to reduce the code duplication as much as possible. I’ll post one more post to explain what I was doing earlier and how I reduced the complexities by breaking down classes to bare minimum.

Game Design & Level Design The dreaded game design! From sometimes I’m stuck with the expanding the game, trying to add more gameplay elements to make sure the game doesn’t start to feel grind-y. I’m planning on taking up the procedural generation stuffs again and see if I can come up with a way to generate proper maps. Also I was thinking of adding a small backstory in the game to make a better sense of all this.

So TL;DR, game coming fine, fixing and restructuring the code base, so going forward i don’t have to worry about code duplication and also looking into ways of generating maps procedurally.

I’ll have one follow up post to this, to explain how I’m restructuring the code.

[yetanothertowerdefensegame]

Designing Maps, The Easier Way

So after adding Kenney's TD assets in my game creating a demo map, I ran into a problem of creating maps because while the first demo map was all fine and dandy, it was pain in the ass to drag and drop or duplicate assets to to create a map. To make things easier I decided to take help of Tiled Map Editor which a designer friend of mine used to use to create levels.

Tile Map Editor Creating levels in Map Editor was again trivial, some work had to be done to use the TMB file generated by Map Editor, basically a XML file, and use to it populate the map in Unity. Another problem I came across was that there was no spritesheet available for the Kenney's meshes to import into Map Editor.

Creating Spritesheets To begin with creating levels in Map Editor, you need a spritesheet / image atlas with all your props to visualize what the level is coming to. To do this, I wrote a small script in C# to take all the models of a given folder and populate it in the scene in a grid in Unity with a zero unit of gap between each of them also helped me visualize all the assets in a pack later on when bought other asset packs. I used the screenshot feature of Unity (and sometimes the taking screenshots manually to get the view right) and fix the image of any extended edges in Krita image editor. 

Populating Maps from Tiled Map Editor Files As I said, creating levels in Map Editor is trivial, the harder task was to read the TMB files and populate the map in Unity. Because in the Kenney's assets, well or at least in most of their packs, all the models are named in proper sequential manner, like tower_defense_001.fbx, tower_defense_002.fbx so on and so forth, it was easier to take the index I'm getting from the grid of the Map Editor export and append that index to a string which points the given model. 

Here is the link to the Github repo of the project.

[yetanothertowerdefensegame]

Asset Jesus & Beatification

I mean beautification!

I came across Kenney’s tile assets some years back and while the game was coming out great, it looked ugly af visually as I was using Unity’s default plane for ground and roads and cubes and cylinders for weapon towers - though still using cubes and cylinders for enemy units. 

Kenney, or Asset Jesus as he known on /r/gamedev, had some sale on his site and was seling Kenney Game Assets 2 dirt cheap and had great collections of tower defense assets.

Replacing my ground and roads with tiles was trivial as I was already using grid system for spawning weapon towers and Player Hero and looked visually rich and decent enough that I can show the progress thus far to other people.

One Problem And The Solution: Designing maps in Unity using the tiles was pain in the ass. To make the process of creating new maps, I decided to use Tiled Map Editor by Thorbjørn Lindeijer, which is pretty simple to use and create tile maps and saves the map. I’ll have a separate post for the Tiled Map Editor and the utility I wrote to use those maps in Unity to generate 3D maps.

And this is how the map I mentioned in the previous post looks like tiled,

[yetanothertowerdefensegame]

Blog Entry #n or how I didn't log my last two years of work

So I started working part time on this Tower Defense prototype some time around April 2015 and plan was to Kingdom Rush kinda TD game but with random generated maps with permadeath, something rogue-like minus the dungeon crawler.

I guess by September/October 2015, I completed a very basic gameplay where the users can install weapons towers along the road using some gold they are given for the first run, the AI units moving towards the user “Home” base, combat between the AI and towers & the Hero which the user can control.

Around November/December I started looking for ways to implement the procedurally generated path but was not happy with the paths generated - when they were getting generated properly. I rather decided to focus on fixing some of progression blocks I had come across in the game and look in PG later. Well I got busy learning Unreal, my day job and/or working on other stuffs in the game. Maybe I’ll have a separate post “later” for what I researched and what I implemented in procedural generation.

This looks like big wall of text and only one pic, I’ll add one random screenshot of the game and talk about Kenney’s assets and beautification of the game in the next post.

See ya in 2019!