Progress with Tower Defence has been slow recently, what with moving and the general disruption that brings, but the other day I did manage to settle in and resolve a few long standing and occasionally nasty bugs which brings the game to a highly playable level. As such, I felt it might be prudent to make a demo available so people can actually try this thing out themselves rather than watching my boring videos.
I’m a long way from guaranteeing it’s crash free, but it’s not far off. There are also bugs galore (see full release notes after the break), and a few things are disabled for being either half implemented or inconsistent in performance or reliability, but it gives a reasonable overview of the project. This release is in the form of a Windows binary, although if there’s any interest in OSX/Linux/mobile builds I’ll happily crank one out and you’re welcome to see if it works.
Controls
Well, mainly mouse. You can also use +/- keys to zoom and the arrow keys to move the map around. I don’t intend to release the game on PC platforms so these were added purely for debugging, and therefore do not represent the experience on device where standard multitouch gestures are supported.
Known issues
- A crash may occur related to the weapon sound effects, I believe this is threading-related but since the audio code is very new I still haven’t investigated.
- Some objects are not destroyed properly, for example the animated bugs that exist to add ambience to the Garden style often don’t unload properly and, if a subsequent game is started with the Industrial style, they can appear there in error.
- The wave generation code is very rough and tends to spit out somewhat ludicrous sets of enemies. I have also (once, never again) experienced an endless loop in this code, so beware.
- You may experience framerate issues when generating very large maps – particularly with the Garden style.
- The “reset wave” button on the top menu bar currently does nothing.
- The option to generate the maze with diagonals currently does nothing.