Absolutely! Go for it. Tower defence is one of my favourite genres and I have ideas for a Mr based tower defence game myself (with my own twists and extensions of course). So it would be great to see what you do with it. If you need some play testers post here too. I'll dot best and I'm sure other people here will too. Good luck with it and keep us posted!

Perhaps posting here about progress will allow me to stay focused for a longer period of time as well! First off, the language has been decided - I'll be using Scala, which can be compiled into Java bytecode.

It has been the longest time since I last was on the drawing board, and there are an uncountable amount of ideas coming up... If there's a lesson I learnt from making unfinished games with Game Maker back in the day, it's that I definitely need to limit the scope into something that resources will allow to finish. Let's see what I'll come up with!

Some of my main concerns include extendability - I would prefer for the map format to be accessible, as well as trying to figure out how to use the graphics library. It's something I should have learnt a long time ago, but I suppose that this will be a good experience.

Actual coding will start in April, but I hope that Merlin's Revenge: Tower Battles - The Second Wave! will turn out to be a fun/challenging game to play. (I'm leaning on omitting the rest of the title, it would be a tad too ridiculousest in hindsight)

I know how that goes. I had a ton of unfinished games (or game fragments really) on the amiga. Posting the progress of MR here certainly kept me on the straight and narrow and its was the first proper game I ever finished.

http://themetalbox.com/tmbdev01/Pallo.exe

A small graphical demo I made some years ago almost entirely, but back then I had no idea on how the drawing and stuff actually worked. Thus, I decided to smooth some rough edges and give it an UI while randomly browsing some old projects yesterday.

Made it into an applet too, but alas, my attempts at running it online were shot down by Oracle's "new" security policies regarding unsigned code.

Anyway, making a game entirely out of graphical elements should be much easier to deal with now.

So like, I'm writing out the specification/plan right now, and like, I got to display my artistic skills when presenting the visual layout draft

That's already more planning than I've ever done for any game I've ever made. You old pro, you!

By the way I haven't been able to run the .exe yet. Not your fault - I just rarely access this site with a Windows PC any more. Right now, I'm on my EeePC 1000 from 2005 which runs Linux Mint. I also use my iPhone and my Nexus 7 to come here. But booting up Windows just takes too long even on my reasonably modern laptop.

Wine?

...But oh yeah, I totally should have taken that into account and whipped up a runnable .jar instead. Maybe I'll do that later.

Midterms are kinda keeping me busy this week and the next.

As for the game itself, I'm wondering whether it'll end up being too similar to Desktop Tower Defense. Then again, I suppose all simple tower defense games are fairly similar to each other, and I don't really have any novel ideas that would be easy to implement either.

Sometimes I get my novel ideas while actually coding it. The code will suggest ways to mess with the game in interesting ways.

Yeah, I guess that's pretty likely to happen. I usually just go ahead and write code and figure things out along the way than plan most things ahead of time.

As for a fairly unrelated question: What was the beginning of MR like? I recall that it was on request from James, but how did you come up with the basic idea? What did you do regarding the design of gameplay and visuals?

Yes briefly it was merlin because of merlin web design which was James company. the graphical style was set to be Amiga like because that is my favourite computer and I did the animation on an emulator. I tried to keep to 30 frames per second to give a smoother effect than the usual 10 frames per second. I wanted it to look retro so that way it could never look "dated" crafty eh? It was also important to me to make sure everything ran nice and smooth. I didn't like "jerky" games as a kid.

The gameplay was defined by the knock back mechanic. The very first playable version was just merlin, the energy blast and a screen full of goblins, about 30 of them. They ran toward you and stopped. You could blast them but they would not die. The image of blasting a load of weak enemies across the screen was what defined the initial gameplay. I wanted being a wizard to feel
Super powerful. I had just read Lord of the rings and was frustrated with gandalf for not really doing that much magic.

right, so I'm still alive, and vaguely have free time for the first time in 4 years or so; I also need me a nice project to build up my javascript chops. HTML Port of MR is coming up... once I get director installed on my computer again.


Time to relearn how the engine works:P

...Whoa, that sounds pretty great! Let us know all the details once you start!

As for this project, I'm still in the "pre-production phase" - the next three weeks will probably become pretty intense at this rate. Ahaha.

I just learned how protoyping works, kinda. I think I still need to play around with it a bit though.

So far, I only really know how the functional parts of javascript work; I've been it/them for all my coding related assignments this term.

I'll get a github up once I'm started, I curently debating to what extent I can keep the code structure the same, and how I'm going to parse the lingo data files into json.

This could be really good - it's one of the directions I wanted to take MR myself, but no time.

I did make a start on a js game engine and started a version of space invaders but even that wasn't finished.

There are various js libraries around for making games, but honestly, I don't think they are necessary - js is easy enough on it's own. If you're doing a github that's great I can join in, if and when I have time.

In the mean time good luck with it and keep us posted. I'm sure you'll do a fantastic job.

Taken my very limited time, I went with another approach - full customisability! Enemies, stages, and towers alike are all configured in external files with a very easy-to-follow syntax!

GUI is almost done on the visual side, although I still need to handle events somehow. File parsing is more or less done, but I still need to implement the enemy logic completely. Having already more or less dealt with the GUI, pathfinding and documentation look like the only obstacles left in my way.

Deadline is in 19 hours, but I think I'll get this thing in a presentable state along with within that time. Meanwhile, here's a screenshot;

Looks promising! You're making rapid progress there..

Well, it has been done for over a week now; there are still a lot of rough edges and a couple of bugs, especially regarding the UI. However, for a project done in about 70-80 hours in the time span of eight days, I'm quite satisfied with the result and looking to get top marks (it's an elementary course, after all). A lot of things are configurable through external files using a very simple format, including adding new enemy or tower types.

Unfortunately, I'm unable to properly package the Scala classes into a runnable jar file. There are some issues with the build configuration as well; I wasn't able to launch the game on the school's computers using a different version of Java. At any rate, a screenshot:

looks good - shame about the packaging difficulties. I'd have liked to have a go.

Well, hopefully you'll get top marks. Can we see a bit of the code?

Looking good there mega, haven't played a TD since the days of yore when I had my laptop. I'll be checking in on this every once in a while.

Thank you very much!

Finals are next week, but after them I'll look into the packaging issue and see if I can get to release this.

Been busy with job applications and stuff the last two weeks. There are a few places I'd like to shape up before releasing the code, but that might take a week or two. I'm too lazy to start up eclipse and do stuff now that the long-awaited vacation has started :P

Oh, but I did get top marks! :)

...As would be expected from a first-year course.

I have a couple of revisions to make into my CV (the equivalent of a resumé here), but was wondering whether you'd like to give me some pointers once I get around to doing that? :)

Be happy to - if you send me the CV by email, I'll be glad to take a look at it and give some feedback.

So the situation with this is that there were some undocumented bugs introduced during the demo session with the course staff, and trying to take them down was kinda icky and now it's already autumn. The next time I'm making a game, it will most likely not end up being done within ten days. This was a very good learning experience nevertheless.


Currently I'm going through the online Eloquent JavaScript book and trying to figure out what the heck happened in the world of web development during the past 15 years. Home pages written with HTML&CSS were all the rage and suddenly we have Ajax, React, browser native 3d rendering, highly scalable cloud services, etc. etc.
￣\_(ツ)_/￣

Oh, and Taskwarrior is awesome. Guaranteed™ 180% productivity increase!!™

Very cool! Will have to check out task warrior - I'm always looking for a better task manager

TESTING COMMENTS

By the way, for new users, every single comment shows as new.

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I also made a nifty web-based game ditribution platform with some mates for a course project. We ended up using Django as the back-end, and worked on it for several nights straight last week. However, I feel that the end result is quite feature-rich, although it certainly still has a bunch of faults. Any feedback is most welcome!
http://quagmirezone.herokuapp.com/

In case it didn't come across, the person above is me. We used TMB as a reference for some miscellaneous things. :)

Is this still being worked on, or has it died silently?

If the latter, perhaps we could hire some of those necromancers from the MR games to fix this . . .

It's not worked on, because the project is finished!

I was planning on making a release and putting all the code on GitHub, but due to the issues mentioned in an earlier comment, that is not looking very feasible at the moment. This is still on my to-do -list, but not very high on it. I would need to write some instructions too...

The game is actually pretty decent and fun to play around with, so I hopefully will get around to fixing those few bugs sometime soon.

Well, I pushed the code on GitHub anyway, along with a disclaimer on the spaghetti code. The game can be played by compiling the project, or if you have no idea what that means, by waiting until I get around to doing things.

The link is: http://github.com/mmKALLL/tower-battles

Dang,

"very soon" turned out to be two years!
There's still two days of winter holidays left - lets see if I can boot this thing up with all the Java updates... :)

Unfortunately did not have time to look at this properly, but at least I did have time to do some 30-60 minute programming mini-challenges!

Including this one demo I've wanted to do for a looong time, but did not know how to do 8 years ago, and which would have taken several days 4 years ago... And swoosh! After just 60 minutes of writing code and 40 minutes of figuring out why it doesn't work (lenght typo), here it is!

http://themetalbox.com/tmbdev01/hiruyasumi-games/1026-colorwaves3/index.html

Beautiful!