Hello there!
It’s been a few weeks since the feeling thirsty Alpha release so I wanted to provide an update about what’s been happening since and what is to come!
Where have you been?!
Well, if you’ve been following our Twitter or our Discord (which you totally should) you’d already know: We’re working on a tower defense!
We’re not doing a tower defense in the traditional sense (but then again, that depends on your definition of traditional!). Everyone here has played and loves Plants vs Zombies, Kingdom Rush, Bloons TD, Defense Grid, and many other popular and not-so-popular titles. In fact, they all do a really good job of scratching that type of tower defense itch.
What do we mean by “Traditional“?
Wikipedia would tell you Rampart is the genesis of the tower defense genre. We don’t want to go that far back, but the competitive nature is exactly what we’re looking for (albeit, with a few more players per game).
When it comes to traditional, we’re looking at the genesis of the current iteration of the Tower Defense genre: early 2000s PC strategy games– specifically one we hold near and dear,
Warcraft III.
Warcraft III had a competitive multiplayer function based on the core game: gather resources, build a base, destroy your enemy’s base. You could play alone or with friends, ranked or casually, solo or on teams. But that wasn’t the only way to play. Coupled with the Reign of Chaos install was a custom game builder: using Warcraft III assets, you could design maps and characters and game settings to play out your own game in the Warcraft III engine. Crafty users created all sorts of imaginative game-types, from Multiplayer Online Battle Arenas like the wildly popular Defense of the Ancients (since bought and remastered into DOTA 2) to iterations of popular existing titles like Final Fantasy 11 or a Pokémon MMO. One that really struck a cord with us at Darkstar were the tower defense games.
Tower defense on Warcraft III
There were several styles of tower defense, but they were all based on a simple premise:
Enemies (or monsters or mobs) would spawn at one end of a lane of grass and try to get to the other side and it was your job to stop them. You did this by building defensive (and mostly immobile) structures that attack them. If you weren’t able to stop them, each monster that crossed the finish line would take one of your lives — reach zero lives and you lose. Like with all genres, each game fractal-spirals out to wildly different designs.
Some had four spawns/lanes that fed into a single lane and required different building and mazing styles depending on your position down the line. Some would allow you to upgrade your towers, while others required you to regularly sell your old towers in order to afford more expensive but way more powerful towers. (Matt Gadient has a lot of great examples over on his site).
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For every style of tower defense, there were a thousand copycats (literally copying the map then changing the names of the mobs) and a dozen modifications to the countless health and damage variables.
There is one competitive play style that, so far, we at Darkstar haven’t seen replicated for the modern market and modern play-styles –i.e. not glued to your PC.
We don’t want to spoil anything here, so check out our Discord for specifics!
What’s on the horizon?
More developer updates, to be sure.
We’ve been tossing around a couple of ideas around the office for what’s to come after our tower defense hits 1.0. A single-player action RPG has come to dominate the conversation, but we’ve also considered expanding on feeling thirsty?.
If you’re an old-school fish, let us know what you think with a comment below.
If you want the most up-to-date info about what Darkstar (and The Pizza Pickle in general) are working on, join our Discord server! (we’ve already linked it twice above, kinda getting the feeling that if you haven’t joined by now, you won’t. Don’t worry though, we’ve got plenty of ideas to get your subscribe, so don’t feel rushed to do it now.)
Thanks for checking out the blog!