Defense of Planet Earth

[DireAussie]

Hi all, I hope everyone is well.

I thought I'd post details of my newest game design. It is titled Defense of Planet Earth. It will be a "tower defense" game where you defend the Earth from invading aliens. On the world map you will be able to move ships around to attack UFO's and defend against UFO landings. UFO's in turn will attempt to land at your cities. When they land the game will change to a city battle screen. There you will place gun and laser turrets and you'll need to defend against waves of attacking aliens. Winning the battle gives you research points to invest in weapon and ship upgrades. Losing a battle will mean you lose the city permanently. You win the game if you defeat all the UFO craft that are invading Earth. You lose if the aliens destroy all your cities.

I am creating it with my XNA game engine which I made in the ongoing development of Planet Wars. I am still going to develop planet wars, but I need to reassess its scope - to do it justice means a lot of time. Though I'm unsure if Defense of Planet Earth (DoPE) wont turn out the be the same thing! I love game design and come up with new and grand ideas every month, but unfortunately they end up being too big for one developer Ah well, whether I finish it or not doesn't matter. Gives me something to do in my spare time and on night shifts at work

Game design document (which is very much a work in progress) if anyone's curious:

http://users.on.net/~dfidge/forums/dope.doc

Here's a few pics:

[Andrew]

Hey good stuff Was thinking as I read it 'What ever happened to your other game' I guess you answered it at the end of the description! Good to see your covering many aspects art/code/design, must keep you busy!

[Weesals]

Sounds like an awesome game, love the back story , fits perfectly. I'm working on my own tower-defense style game too (although more of a tower offense)

Im sure the game will be dope

[DireAussie]

Hey good stuff Was thinking as I read it 'What ever happened to your other game' I guess you answered it at the end of the description!

Hehe, call me a typical indie developer - starts something off then abandons it for something different, repeat ad infinium Though my vision for Defense of Planet Earth is clearer than Planet Wars so hopefully something will come of it.

Sounds like an awesome game, love the back story

Thanks! It is a bit incoherent at the moment as I was throwing down ideas with disregard for grammar. I checked out your web page a few months ago, are you still working on Weesals engine and the sub game or is your tower offense game something new?

[Andrew]

hehe yeah, a familiar feeling!!

Keen to hear from you too Weesals.. whats new?!

[Weesals]

The submarine game was for the Intel gamedemo contest, we scored 3rd place for Gaming-on-the-go (having laptop specific features). It can be downloaded from here if you want to give it a go (ignore it crashing on exit.. thats.. a feature) As for the engine, its basically finished, just need to redo audio (apparently FMOD isnt entirely free..) and actually develop a game in it

What do you think about XNA? Although I dont like C# too much, XNA seems to be almost the perfect graphics library

Andrew: Nothing much, been to Holopoint alot . What are you guys showing at AAVCON?

DireAussie: You should look into demoing this game at this years AAVCON, applications were supposed to be in last Friday, but I'm sure Ben would be able to get you in

[Andrew]

sounds good
Not sure yet.. we have a few things up our sleeves just depends on what we have ready by then.. as vague as that sounds Probably Johnnies Piggy Bank + Another. About to start on an SAFC funded project too so time might be tight, see how we go!
Anyways sorry to hijack! You should try show your stuff at the indie room too Dire (as weesals said!)

[DireAussie]

I'd like to show at AAVCON, but perhaps next year - at the moment there's not much to show that a gamer would be interested in. So instead I'll put up a quick demo of my work so far on here You'll need to download the Microsoft XNA 3.0 redistributable:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=6521d889-5414-49b8-ab32-e3fff05a4c50&displaylang=en

You'll also need the usual .NET frameworks.

Download (includes planet wars and dope): http://users.on.net/~dfidge/games.zip

It is all still basic and hardly any game in it, but the engine is rock solid. Poke around in the files you'll see that a lot of the interface is driven by XML so if you dont like the colour, style or positioning of objects they can be changed incredibly easily. Unlike many indy projects, practically any screen resolution is possible (though I've filtered out those under 1024x768 in the list).

The Planet Wars cards are all XML files and I've made the card graphics uncompiled so the game itself is very moddable. A pity there are only 2 cards so far

In Planet Wars - to play cards, either drag them onto your opponent's base or left click the opponent's base to select them, then right click on a card to play. There's buttons to Deploy a miner to mine resources and 4 buttons on the bottom right to deal cards as well as view discarded cards and cards to be reshuffled.

In DoPE - not much has been done yet, but you can left click on cities to view city maps where battles will take place. Nice programmer graphics in this one

In both games you can scroll out and in with the mouse wheel, use arrow keys and use numpad 9 and 3 to rotate. If you scroll out on the world map in DoPE it will look a little wierd when you use the left and right arrow keys to scroll - you'll see how I have implemented a wrapping horizontal map (this is how I believe other games like Dominions 3 do it). In the proper game the user would not be allowed to scroll out that far.

Save/Load game should be working in Planet Wars. DoPE might crash if you try to do it!

What do you think about XNA? Although I dont like C# too much, XNA seems to be almost the perfect graphics library

I made a few comments on my new member thread in the general forum - still loving XNA. Mainly because doing things in XNA/c# takes half the dev time vs c++/DirectX, and with the type of games I'm making I dont need the extra features and performance that c++/directX has.

[Weesals]

You've got a while to build it though

Planet Wars kept crashing to start with, but I think I just needed to choose the settings before starting the game (maybe have default settings), otherwise it seemed to work quite well

I couldn't figure out what to do in DOPE, clicking just seemed to enter a city or exit it, has the rest just not been coded yet?

[DireAussie]

Planet Wars kept crashing to start with, but I think I just needed to choose the settings before starting the game (maybe have default settings), otherwise it seemed to work quite well

Yes, that's the cause. There's a file called interfacesettings.xml where it reads defaults from. I purposely deleted it for this build thinking that it will still have the basic defaults but obviously it doesnt Silly me! However if you choose all game settings (like you did) then start the game it will automatically create interfacesettings.xml and then the settings you choose will be restored next time you start the game (this saves the user having to redo their favourite settings every time).

I couldn't figure out what to do in DOPE, clicking just seemed to enter a city or exit it, has the rest just not been coded yet?

Yeah, its just a shell at the moment - I've only worked on it a few days here and there. More to come soon!

Thanks for giving them a go

[Andrew]

Took me a while to get planet wars going with the crash too but eventually worked it out , seemed cool - although I wasnt heaps sure what i was doing hehe.. give it some nice art and you've got something that looks really solid. Looking forward to seeing more of DOPE too! thanks for sharing.