I'm very happy to publish a playable Demo of Dofense today.
TLDR: The development has resumed after a break of nine months and weather looks clear for a 2021 release. For details, read on.
Last update from me was nearly a year ago. In this post I would like to put down why I stopped working on this game and then resumed again.
If you go through earlier posts, you will notice a drastic change in the looks of the game. It is because I was experimenting a lot. I've to admit that I didn't have a clear picture in my head of what the final game was going to look like. I only knew I wanted to make a TD game, because I liked this genre and my first shot at it ("Fold wars") did reasonably good as a free game.
However all my ideas of what a better TD game would feel like, were highly subjective. Many of them turned out to be misguided. As a result none of the prototypes ended up in a fun gameplay. Nearly a year ago, I felt lost after spending so much time on this game. At that point, I did what I should have done already. I spent a lot of time playing popular TD titles. I realized that almost all of them were focused on the XP grind. You play through a finite number of maps, but as you make progress you can only win if you play with strong abilities. Through each play you accumulate XP and you use it to upgrade your abilities. So when you replay the same maps again, you have higher chance to clear them. This mechanic offers a lot of replayability to the players and probably that's what the audience seems to like (even though eventually they would get tired of it). In this light, my plan seemed completely off the mark. My hope for improvement in TD was 3D environment, a custom level editor and focus on variety of strategies. The first two of these seem irrelevant to fun gameplay. I didn't feel inclined to implement the XP grind mechanism on top of my TD gameplay. So I decided to stop working on the game for the time being.
I worked on other game ideas for the rest of 2020. You can find more about them from my website. I made these games in 2D. This was in contrast to what I was doing with Dofense. I like doing 3D, because I'm familiar with 3D modelling tools. I'm not as confident with my 2D drawing skills. And somewhere I had this misguided notion that 3D assets look automatically better than 2D. These misconceptions went away as I developed some small 2D games over the year. I gained more experience with Unity's 2D features and acquired more confidence in creating 2D artwork myself in Inkscape and Krita.
With these new tools under my belt, I gave another look to Dofense in November. Soon I decided I was ready to resume work on Dofense. The demo published today, is first playable build after a development sprint of last two months.
Now Dofense has a simplified 2D environment, which allows me to do quick experiments when it comes to visual quality of graphics and effects. My understanding of "juice" or "game-feel" has also improved over time. I still have much to learn in those areas, but I'm positive that the game feels more polished than before. This area requires lot of experimentation. Moreover I've certain ideas about how to increase replayability of this game, without putting the player through XP grind. I'll talk more about it as I make progress. Join my Discord for more discussions about game's development.
The demo does NOT have much content at the moment. I wanted to put it out there in preparation for the Steam festival next month. I'll update the demo a few times before the event adding new mechanics and level maps.
Stay tuned and stay safe.