Only had a few hours to work on the ol'LD41 this time around - Happy to have something made, even if it didn't quite make it to how I had envisioned it.

Wishlist TODO - Sound; start menu; animations; limit movements to the grid.

The Third Death – TD

Life is currency – upon reading this, Tower Defense immediately came to mind. Having never coded anything quite like a TD game, I looked to the stars for inspiration and luckily came across Brackeys complete Tower Defense game tutorial series on YouTube. I followed the guts of his design for the outline, but I knew my TD game would be more akin to the classic Desktop tower defense where the player is setting up the maze, rather than adjusting to one.

Of Achievements and Fails: All totaled up, I did damn well, given that I only had Saturday evening + Sunday to work. The achievements were all in the must have category of game design, while the fails were mostly the niceties such as pretty graphics and expanding even further from the main tutorials.

Achieved Design Goals:

• The player starts with “full” health, and it would consume some very large number or % to create or upgrade a tower.
• The game field would be decently sized with plenty of room to build a maze of towers.
• Enemy AI should be smart enough to path out of any maze, and destroy any towers that cause 100% blocking. – Achieved but janky as hell
• Multiple tower types to at minimum complete the holy TD trinity of Rapid, AOE, and Slowing towers. – Achieved but ugly art.
• Complete game loop (Start, Fail, Restart + Pause Screen).

Failed Design Goals: - Waves managed by a finely crafted data CSV or XML file. – Failed (but I tried hard) - Cool radial context sensitive quick-select menu for buying new towers + upgrading/selling old towers. - Visual cues on selected tower for range, rate, etc. - Good graphics and VFX. - Web Build Compatible – It builds and runs, but the waves never spawn! No time left to debug…

Making some decent progress on Deep Freeze Café: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/$246302

GIF: https://gfycat.com/veneratedfluidaustraliansilkyterrier

I had two big goals with this one: 1) Use suggestions from the kids, and 2) Finally learn to do some procedural level design. Both of these accomplished!

Ran into major snags with the customer system that delayed me so bad that characters are in T-Pose, the win/lose state is missing, and the set is still unfinished, and no audio at all. Main loop works, so... ship it!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/deep-freeze-cafe