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This week I have mainly worked on the game design document, but I also created this first draft of the map layout.
In this layout there are four types of squares, the white squares being the space that the player and NPCs can navigate, the blue squares being the spawn points of the enemy NPCs, green squares being impassable and the red square being the location of the life tree that the player has to protect.
Lets analyze the map from right to left.
First is the enemy NPCs spawn point, It’s located as far away from the player spawn point, the life tree, as possible. This is partially since the challange of the game is too keep the enemy NPCs from said life tree, so the distance gives more play area, and so that the player can’t simply start the game by intercepting the enemy NPCs before they even have time to act. The three spawn points stops the player from blocking entrence by simply building the towers around the spawn points. This could be achieved with two spawn points if there are fewer resources for tower construction, but we didn’t want that, since the game is built around creating towers.
Next is the area with two entry points. The two entry points with a width of two are there so that the player has time to get used to the games most basic challenges, enemies attacking on multiple fronts and building in a two square wide space.
The wide space after that is a place where the player can experiment if they wish, but also a chance for the player to relax slightly while waiting for the enemies to traverse it.
The next wall has three corridors of different width, where the player can try out the one square wide corridor for tower building.
The next area after the wall is a room with an island in the midle, and due to enemy pathing, this leads to any break in the previous walls corridors has the enemy NPCs able too attack the surviving corridors from behind, causing the difficulty to increase in this area.
The next wall has four single square wide corridors, and the same pathing behavior as above, causing the difficulty to increase once more with the challenge of having to defend four places at once.
After that there is two long corridors that zig-zag up the map. This is mostly filler since it just slows down the game, but it also has the challange that if the player is helping with the defence of one end, it takes quite some time to get to the other end.
The corridor ends with a split path that makes defense difficult.
Finally there is four corridors leading to the life tree, causing the player to test all theire skills of defending 2 square wide corridors, defending four places at once and defendeing places far away from each other.
This was however the first draft of the map and it doesn’t fill its forest aesthetic with the very maze like feel and hard edges. It’s is also made up entirely of placeholder artwork, all of which will be fixed in later versions.
 
About Pontus Hassis
2014 Graphics
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