Design discussion: tower types and upgrades

[akien-mga]

In this topic we could brainstorm about the kind of towers/turrets (don't know what's the best word, but it doesn't matter :p) we want to have in the (more or less final) game.

It's somewhat dependent on the game theme (#2), but there's also some more general logic things that we need to settle upon.

Basically the initial idea would be that towers would have:

• a type (defines the kind of action/damage/skill they perform)
• an upgrade level (defines the "era" they correspond to if we continue with the theme proposed in Design discussion: theme, story, art style #2, i.e. medieval/steampunk/sci-fi)

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Regarding tower types, we had so far those proposals in the pad:

@fry-:

Tower types:

• 1x normal direct damage,
• 1x area damage (makes lesser damage to single units, but can damage multiple units that are near by at once),
• 1x slow motion (makes low / no damage, but slows down enemies so other towers have more time to deal damage),
• 1x poison (deals low / no damage, but poisons the enemy unit and makes it suffer damage while walking)

@ObaniGemini:

Towers :

• Weak + Normal range + fast (e.g : turret)
• Strong + slow + large zone damages + Low range (e.g : cannon)
• Very weak + Very High range + fast + slowing the ennemy (e.g : mage tower)

Feel free to build upon those or propose other stuff so that we can decide what to implement. Of course we will need assets made (or found, if in the correct style) for each tower type + upgrade level, so the opinion of our artists will weigh a lot ;)

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The other part is upgrade levels, which would let upgrade each tower type to a stronger one. It could be done either per-tower, i.e. you always build level 1 towers and need to upgrade them, or globally (you build a very expensive mass upgrade and from now on all your towers of this type will be upgraded, both the old and the new). I think the first solution is better though, the second one would be way too expensive and would make balancing very hard (huge power increase all of a sudden vs. incremental increase tower by tower).

Once we decided on the tower types, we could start thinking about what each upgrade would bring to each type as bonus (attack increase, range increase, new skills, etc.).

[ObaniGemini]

I think for each upgrade the tower should increase its attack range radius and its power a little bit.

Maybe could we add a very cheap tower that would be a wall, blocking ennemies and making them taking time to destroy/get round of it.

[fry-]

@ObaniGemini I think we use fixed building placements (buildable area and walkpath of enemies that is not buildable), so this block tower is no option I guess.

@akien-mga good point with the upgrades. I would make it that way: you start all with tier 1 towers. after X enemies killed OR you buy the upgrade, you can build tier1 or tier2 (2 different buttons in the GUI) and also can click on already built tier1 towers to manually upgrade them.