Tower Evolution – Postmortem

Had to fall back to the Jam, almost ran out of time. Overall, very satisfied with the core game, just wish I had added more polish. Play it here.

What went right:

Level format and code

I’ve never made a good tile engine before, but I’m very satisfied with this one. Levels are stored in PNG format, each color corresponding to a certain tile type. The entire level is rendered at once and trimmed, but the levels are small enough that there are no performance issues.

Basic gameplay elements

I knew what I wanted to do within the first hour, and I mostly stuck to my ideas the whole time. Having a solid base allowed me to focus on programming the engine instead of design.

What went wrong:

Java

Java is awesome and all, but until two days ago, I had no idea how to use applets, canvases, or anything else in AWT. It only took a few hours to learn, but that was valuable time.

Balance

I didn’t put much thought into the damage rates or enemy attributes, and there is no resource system, so it’s very easy to overpower enemies by spamming everything.