The Demon hand
In the past iterations of this game, I had implemented a certain kind of mechanism for the enemy to destroy tower. It was usually in the form of some big enemy that will go around killing the towers. Recently when I wanted to implement the same functionality I tried to think how it could be made fun and how it could serve multiple gameplay purposes. That's how the Demon hand was born.
A restless hand roams around the map doing things on whim. One of them is trolling the towers. It takes fancy to a certain tower. It will approach it. Ponder for a few moments making up its mind. If it doesn't like the look of the tower, it will turn into a fist and crush the tower in an instant. This may destroy the carefully crafted maze of yours, thus leaking a flow of enemy to your precious cores at the most inopportune moment. But the hand may as likely loose all the interest in the tower and spare you the agony. Who knows!
But that's not the only thing it's good for. Whenever the enemy gate you are attacking is about to fall, it issues a rescue call to any demon hands that might be listening. Yes, this hand is also a good listener. Upon receiving such a call, the hand will drop everything that it's doing and will fly to the rescue of the gate. It will carefully lift the gate up and relocate it somewhere else.
The gate will be restored to its full health. Its enemy waves will be reset too. Now you will have to kill it all over again. But as it nears to another explosion, it will again call the hand for rescue and will be rescued once more. Unless... you have already destroyed the Demon hand.
This Boss has added several key aspects to the gameplay than just adding to the difficulty.
- As you will find out, there are multiple strategic solutions to winning on such maps. Sometimes, you have to kill the hand first. But other times you have to kill the gate even though it will be rescued by the hand.
- You have to build a more resilient maze that will have some redundancies. This way when the hand crushes some of the towers, your maze won't leak the flood of enemies right away. A more robust plan, will give you time to repair the damage done by the hand.
- Without the Hand the gameplay has a "rushing" kind of quality to it. The enemy waves keep getting stronger and stronger. You have to destroy the gate as soon as you can. However with the introduction of the gate rescue and respawn mechanism, the enemy waves reset. This lull in enemy action opens up new strategic opportunities.
- For every match there's a minimum number of cores that you have to save in order to win. However that number is not very meaningful so far. This is due to the ever-increasing intensity of the enemy waves. Even if you are required to typically save 4 cores, as soon as you loose one or two cores the energy production reduces. In many cases this leads to eventual defeat. It just takes longer. However the gate respawn and reset fixes this flaw. Even if you loose a few cores and your energy production drops, the gate might reset next and you will get another chance to gain upper hand. In the maps with Core Mint, you can even replenish the lost cores.
Other changes
- 2 new levels were added in Sector 1. "Merry go around" - This is a more fun level that introduces the player to Pyro tower. "Jumping Jack" (a new level that uses the old name), that introduces the Worm enemy for the first time.
- Some levels were revised to highlight the new mechanic they are introducing. ("Honey Squeeze" that introduces parachutes, "No straight lines" that introduces the Rollers, "Deer head" with more sprinters in it)
- Fixed the editor brushes for water, lava and hard ground, so that the preview of tile being drawn is rendered correctly
- New VFX for tower destruction. There are now 3 ways in which a tower can get destroyed - 1) you can manually reclaim them 2) creep can flood them 3) Demon hand can crush them. For each case, a special VFX was added that fits the cause of destruction
- Extra creep - A map can now have extra creep. Until now the creep was only sourced from the emergence of enemy gates. But now there could be some extra creep on the map. You will find a new brush in level editor to draw the creep. This could be put to more creative uses than you think.
- The creep health parameter is now specified per level, instead of per enemy gate. This was required in order to implement the extra creep feature.
- Added maxOverseers slider to the level. (Overseer is the eye in the sky that spoils the towers)
- Reorganized some sliders in the level editor to make better sense.
- Updated the discharged battery color in Core Mint
- Healing effects now douse fire
- Updated skydrill cursor with a hex shape
- Performance improvements - After some profiling I discovered some expensive segments of code running every frame. It was the code in Worm's hop analysis. It was causing FPS drop every time the worm would hop. It was introduced in the new path finding library introduced in last build. It was fixed. Moreover some other algorithmic changes in enemy movement helped improve the overall performance.
