Our Deck Building Game Evolved Into Something Unexpected!
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- Опубликовано: 17 ноя 2022
- We made a big mistake that caused our deck building game to evolve into something unexpected. In this devlog you'll see how we tried to use text to image AI to generate art, a big development mistake and a new round of prototyping. On the other side we came out with a new indie game idea!
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Genuinely curious: What is your favorite base defense or tower defense game of all time and why?
Bloons TD 6 because of the relaxing nature and strategy involved. Also unlocking new troops and powerups as you progress makes the game feel satisfying and gives you more reason to play.
WYS Tower Defense Levels
Mindustry, It's so fun while also being extremely strategic. Good for challenging players. The game has a campaign mode where you take over the planet while protecting your core. Gathering resources with automated machines are also really satisfying to watch.
All of kingdom rush games. I basically have played all of this type: Bloons TD, Plants v Zombies, Fieldrunners, etc… The games from Ironhide are better. However, I enjoy the freedom of building wherever you want like in Fieldrunners or Bloons TD
I'm gonna just assume that RTS counts. If so, I'd say either Age of Mythology, or Starcraft 2
I really like this minimal approach of having one playable character who defends your kingdom. I am looking forward to seeing more!
I got massive Kingdom vibes from the game idea, and I'm all here for it!
Super excited for this😁
Top down kingdom
Quite literally
I felt the same! :)
yeah. that was my first impression as well. and i love it. one of my favorite tower defense games
Reminds me a lot of Kingdom, but I hope there's enough uniqueness to make this stand on its own feet.
I have caught myself making games like a tower defense a few times, thinking I am doing something right, because I am working on a fun game, but it's hard to give people a reason to actually buy it. Something really has to knock my socks off immediately by just looking at it to make me buy another tower defense. I am sure it's a bit different, because you can always sell it as "Jonas Tyroller's Tower Defense", which is probably good enough of a hook.
I am absolutely thirsty for good tower defense and base defense games. I can count the good ones on one hand: Kingdom Rush, Plants vs Zombies, Radiant Defense, Orcs Must Die 1. If you have any other tips for S-Tier tower defense or base defense games, make sure to let me know. :D
@@JonasTyroller Bloons TD 6 (and previous installments) is awesome!
@@JonasTyroller The free & old flash game Desktop Tower Defense is genuinely great. The two Soulcaster games by the dev of Escape Goat (on Steam titled "Soulcaster: Part I & II") are a short (1.5-2h each) and great mix of old-school RPG and tower defense, including a great soundtrack. Defender's Quest is also genuinely amazing, though it doesn't feature large-scale base building. An important insight from the latter two games is that if you can make your towers more like characters or beasts, then your tower defense has *way* more room for personality. (E.g. what's cooler, a turret that launches fire arrows, or a dragon that launches fireballs?)
Let me follow up those 3-4 great games with ones that aren't necessarily good, but that do something unique you could take inspiration from: The survival fantasy of They Are Billions is amazing, though apparently the gameplay itself is off. Unstoppable Gorg is another game with a unique aesthetic but forgettable gameplay. Defense Grid: The Awakening took inspiration from Portal by personifying the towers / base as a chatty AI companion, though the gameplay was unoriginal. I didn't like Revenge of the Titans overall, but it had some very interesting ideas with a between-levels progression: you play a campaign, and your resources and researched (unlocked) towers carry over between missions; complete an early mission well and you carry those resources forward; do poorly and you'll be in a tougher situation in the next mission. Interesting but snowbally. Arcen Games' AI War is many many things, including a base defense & tower defense game component; the gameplay is impenetrable for newcomers, but you might get some inspiration from watching introductory gameplay footage of this game or its sequel. The Anomaly games (e.g. Anomaly Warzone Earth) take the opposite route and let you invade AI bases. The Creeper World series (e.g. Creeper World 3: Arc Eternal) does something interesting with its grey-goo-style enemy, though it has a very weird in-mission difficulty curve (in that the first seconds of each mission are often by far the hardest). Infested Planet is another game with lots of game elements including obvious inspirations from Starcraft and tower defense. The Quiet Sleep has maybe the most unique concept for a tower defense game (it's set in your mind), but it's janky, unpolished, and frankly not fun. Finally, Mindustry is a mix of Factorio and tower defense.
@@JonasTyroller Check "Rush Royale", a redefined somewhat competitive + co-op tower defense
@@JonasTyroller Talk about interesting tower game, here are the few that give me long impression with it mechanic here (though this is more of 'tower offense')
+"Anomaly: Warzone Earth"
+ "Royal Squad" (on 'armorgame', too bad Flash going down so lot of good game on that site are down, so have to wait to see if some of the can be recovered)
+ Can't managed to remember the name of that tower offense game, only know that it sci-fi, do allow to build tower for defend and certain factory structure to build vehicle unit here, in order to send attack the enemy back who have the same as your ?
This is actually such a great video, because it showcases a lot of the planning and scapping that goes into gamedev, a lot of devlog channels rarely mention, but what's ultimately just as important as the "actual" development of a game, a.k.a. the later stages
Yeah!! A lot of people seem to just *make something* without particularly considering why they're making it or what their end-goal is first.
Bro your pianos skills are epic
Watching this video was kind of a relief because I just went through this xD (Having the "aha!" moment, prototyping the thing, realizing it's not good, back to square 1)
It sucks and can be demotivating, but finding the right idea is as hard as making the game itself. I guess it's just natural!
Needle in the haystack, but when you find it, grasp it so it won't fall back into the hay.
1:17 that sounds like a professional composition. Really nice!
The way you make art from the ai is very promising. I've been following stable diffusion and the likes for a couple months now and this seems like a great way to combine it into game dev with a consistent art style.
Yeah, I feel like at the moment you still need a bit crafty to make it work, but things will likely get easier and easier.
egg
I've also been experimenting with stand stable diffusion among other AI generated stuff for concept art purposes and i kind went in blind only to be both surprised and very impressed with the results after some work refining the prompts and settings.
It's an extremely promising endeavor and potentially a huge help for us game devs that can't draw for shit.
I thought you could include the style as part of the text prompt. Like "dragon attacking a city, oil painting." Maybe that's not for all generators though?
@@TAPgiles Oil painting is a medium not a style so you will still end up with pictures looking different. It's like a pen, you have some high detailed pictures out there and you have some very simple comics out there all with the same medium (pen). :)
You can see how he used the style transfer algorithms in the video these basically try to apply some patterns they learn from one image to your other images, this is currently one of the better ways to attain realative similarity.
I love that you had the humility to start from scratch. This new idea looks awesome. I look forward to learning more about it!
When he said giants and flying creatures it reminded me so much of clash of clans!! So excited for the game :)
I love this rogue like idea, there’s definitely a large market of content creators who would play this
After seeing the Will You Snail advertisement, I came up with an idea... WILL YOU SNAIL PLUSHIES!!!
Even if you didn't go for the card game in the end, really glad you weren't going for the ai art. Yes, currently stable diffusion is now able to keep the art style more consistently, but the fact is that it requires a model made from images by artists, who more often than not didn't agree to be swollen by the basilisk
Hey Jonas, I thought it would be a good idea to upload all of these prototype / game ideas to a website and basically have your own flash game site for all of your incompleted projects, It hurts me to see all of your guys’ work go unused!
While watching your video discuss ideas I thought: simple top down tower defence but with an army formation. Then I thought, wouldn't it be interesting if your army has no AI and you, as a general on the battlefield, need to ride up to your soldiers to order repositioning and charges. Then as upgrades for bigger battles you could have a bugle to trumpet charge and retreat mass orders. Even to have flag bearer generals who you can order to ride out and deliver orders.
Ironically enough I thought that the card game was one of the least interesting ideas from last video, but I love the kingdom management idea!
The card game was difficult to explain in such a short amount of time. (Which is another minus for the card game idea.)
This series is already inspiring! I haven't watched Jonas long enough to have seen most of the Will You Snail? devlogs but seeing this process is very fascinating.
Very creative, amazing work! Hope the project keeps improving and progresses well. I'm excited to see how it ends up 👍🏻
Thank you for sharing your journey, including the bumps along the way. I enjoy watching your prototyping, as I am weak in this area, personally.
The piano music you demo'd sounds great!
Happy you enjoyed it. Thanks. :)
Looks great!!! So excited to see the progress, the art style behind the blurred outro looks beautiful! Good job
Islanders: You choose the place, computer decides the available building.
New keyboard game prototype: You choose the building, computer says where its gonna spawn.
I'm excited to see what hooks and new ideas you guys will come up with for the genre
NIce! I'm excited to see what art direction you guys take!
I still think the two player hiking game was an amazing idea, maybe you should do it too some time!
We'll definitely keep that in our backlog. A lot of people seemed to like the look of that.
That last game you created. I feel like you need to add a grid! bigger buildings take up more grid space, easier to wall and the overall game flows better.
Very cool! Congrats on generating & validating this awesome idea!
The Age of Empire 2 alert sounds in the background triggered me so much ^^ The english are attacking !
This looks really promising!
That one looks even more promising than the last one! Can't wait to see where it goes
well that escelated radly quickly
:D
Now this was unexpected!
That AI dragon at 2:46 may not look like a dragon but it looks pretty awesome, like a city built on a cow skull or something.
Looks like you guys made some FUN mistakes there. Kinda expected while you guys building the chemistry between each other. Sound like a lot of fun. Excited to see what you guys come up with. Enjoyed watching your videos. I myself have a couple ideas for a base defense if I ever start partake in game dev journey lol.
Awesome! Make it happen! :D
Those "pushing" wall blocks should absolutely be skinned as pots of boiling oil/tar being poured down at the attackers.
Overall the idea seems interesting, but the key part of base defense will be in making sure the wave variety is both fun and fair without being too easy. There needs to be enough variety that forces the player to try new strategies, and some method of telegraphing the incoming waves so that players can see the threat coming and plan out defenses. Plus a bit of rng so that it's not always the same waves at set intervals.
It's like a top down RTS version of Kingdom. That's the vibe I get from it. So if anything the concept is proven to work, but you can make a more engaging, expansive battlefield from the top down while maintaining the minimalist kingdom building theme.
Reminds me of Tooth and Tail, an RTS where you control a single character. Of course teams are more symmetric there.
7:02 - Yo, this stick figure version also looks fun 😀
Feels like kingdom new lands in 3d :D
Looks good! The idea kind of reminds me of a game called "They Are Billions", which is a tower defense/base building game where you expand a sort of village while trying to keep hordes of zombies away.
Ich wünsche dir viel Glück mit dem Spiel. Das Konzept gefällt mir!
(I wish you much luck on this game and I love the concept!)
Danke.
(Thank you.)
Wow that medieval soundtrack though😮😮
I would def play what the game seems like its going to be based on this video. Even as it changes so long as you hold tight to "minimalist kingdom manager" I promise a wishlist and purchase.
looks very fun. Maybe I mis-understood but perhaps instead of having to place particular buildings in particular places you could make it so buildings require special features like a forest or a river, still giving it the feeling of freedom while still allowing there to be "restrictions" on placement. But yeah looks great, I hope I can play it one day!
Bro that piano was cool
Cant wait to hear more of that
👍
Really enjoying this series. Thanks
Thanks for watching. :)
Super cool! Kind of giving me Vampire Survivors with Kingdom building.
I love the flash game feel of Paul's prototype art for the final game
The prototype at 5:34 looks cool but I'm exited for this game too!
Great video, and what a neat concept you came up with in the end. I have to say though as someone that loves tower defense and RTS games, something that stood out to me as a negative was having premade building spots only. Wouldnt it be more fun to have certain tiles give bonuses to certain buildings, but not force you to only build that thing? Like a high ground tile would make your cannons only attackable by flying units. A water tile gives more fisherman gold per turn.. etc.
Simple is good, restrictions are good; but I really hope you leave some room for creativity still!
Room for creativity. Yes, I hope so as well. There should be different ways to solve a level.
for me personally what i want from a game is to do a bunch of fun things that lead up to a cool thing.
any game that does this well is an immediate buy.
Like making a lot of small purchases, defending your castle to lead up to having a relay cool castle and a big siege at the end? :D
Pov, squid is making art for the new game
JONAS IMPORTANT MESSAGE!!!
Keep being Awsome and never stop your amazing sense of humour you are a true legend who always gives me hope when I am struggling on a game project.
Always be a hilarious beacon of hope and never give up as you have taught me
Thanks for the warm words.
kinda reminds me of Kingdom New Lands which is also a tower defense with rising difficulty and you collect gold from the hunter etc. but Kingdom new Lands is a 2d game so i am rly excited about what you will accomplish
The game concept looks pretty good
Finally! A Jonas tower defence game. Can't wait to play this!
Man, that tower defense idea got me excited! An idea I had was maybe you could add in different playable "characters" (A knight with a short range sword, an archer with a long range bow, a king who makes more gold, a messenger with low damage but moves faster) to give a lot of replay value and variety quite easily.
One thing I should state while the project is in an early phase: If you want to make money with a game you need to research if there is an actual market for it. Things to consider:
(1) Is there demand for the genre? What is your target audience? There are pie charts for which genres sell best on Steam. Look at that carefully.
(2) How much competition is there? There are genres that are completely oversaturated so even fantastic games will have a tough time.
(3) What do you provide that the competition doesn't?
If your goal is to make money you have to be able to answer these questions. Just because you like something doesn't mean that enough other people do, too - I have fallen into that trap myself. And with that said, best of luck to you two!
Hmh. Agreed. With the new game we want to be to Stronghold what ISLANDERS was to City Skylines. So just a really nice simple version of something we know people love. Let's see if it works out.
Loved the music and production in this video, sounded really good with headphones on! The concept of enemies coming to the village in waves reminded me of Bad North which is definitely not a bad thing! Interesting to see how you reverted back to prototyping again after scrapping the deck building game. I'm wondering how come you decided not to go with a prototype from the previous devlog? I guess, as you said, you really really settled on the idea of a minimalist kingdom builder and that wasn't something that would fit with the previous prototypes?
Yeah. We fell in love with the kingdom management setting plus thought there might be a bit of a gap in the market after some research.
Jonas this looks awesome cant wait to see what this becomes
I gotta say, I love watching these devlogs. Watching you two's wonderful decision making and problem solving together is really fun to watch. I'm just wondering that a tower-defense game is not eye-catching enough (for me at least) to want to play. Every tower defense game that's interested me has been one with a difference right up-front and center. Also, notably, they've all had huge upgrade trees for the items you build/destroy with and lots of different ways of tackling the problem of people running at you. That's just me, though.
Also, I thought it could just be worth mentioning that your current tower defense set up vaguely reminds me of 20 seconds till dawn, with the onslaught of enemies coming at you. I'm thinking there could be something there. Maybe an "infinite night" mode that has no "upgrade phase"?
I'm wondering if you two accidentally hit something good with the card game idea. Especially with it being playable in-person, it makes a real-world board game equivalent of any video game you make be possible down the line if it has a card component. What you're making now reminds me of a few economy-based board games that I've played in the past (Dune the board game is the best example I can think of), with money being something that you can use to buy cards. Perhaps you could have a system where you gain money from killing/stopping enemies, and are able to use that money to draw a card with a new unit/ability/upgrade? I'm sure you two had your reasons when scrapping the card idea, though, so perhaps not.
Once again, I love your work and as soon as I have money I plan on buying Will You Snail. You're an awesome content and game creator, and I'm excited to see what you do. I just had a couple ideas that I felt could perhaps help. I'm just a gamer, not game developer, though. Cheers!
Thanks for the lovely insights. Let's see if we'll be able to convince you in the eye-catching department. We got a pretty art style, or so I think at least. I also agree that it's important to be able to tackle problems in a lot of different ways. That makes it feel more like strategy game and less like a puzzle with only one solution. Interesting that you mentioned 20 seconds till dawn. We stumbled across that in our research phase as well. :)
The gameplay is looking so fun! I think it would be nice to at least randomize structures placement (procedural map gen or just building a lot of level layouts idk), but this idea really looks promising
Yep, it's catchy! Good job :)
Love ur videos and games, Jonas!
Thank you! :)
The final prototype looked like it was headed to a game like mindustey.
But the extremely simplified version with only one resource and without conveyor belts. :D
Cool devlog
sounds like a topdown vesion of 'two crowns kingdom'
This reminds me a bit to tribes of midgar, keep it up!
My "first game idea" was pretty similar to this, just more focused on the player actions and mechanics, upgrading the players weapons etc.
Naturally that didn't go very far, but I'd love to go try again with that idea one day, I'll be looking for some good ideas!
In my idea it was based in levels, the objective was to defend the town from monsters, namely the buildings, the monsters holding torches would be able to burn them down and if they all got destroyed you would lose.
But once a day/night for a short time the player would be able to enter a portal, where they can upgrade their weapons or potions.
The player would have needed to collect resources in-between fighting in order to try and keep the walls repaired.
It depends how "realistic" your aiming for, but one idea I really liked for a trap was some from of "catapult platform".
Which would send monsters up and flying when walked over, then they'd splat down half way across the screen, I thought it'd have a good "wow factor" for a game clip or trailer.
I definitely find this new idea a lot more appealing, I could totally see myself sinking a lot of time into it as long as it isn't too short.
i already saw your prototyp (paul showed me) i i gotta say i love it
I've been working on my own tower defense for almost 1.5 years now! Very excited to see where this goes 😁
Nice. What you have so far looks pretty promising. Keep up the great work!
Here’s a comparison I doubt anyone else will give, this reminds me of a Roblox tycoon sim, particularly the military tycoons? It’s a genre so you can see lots of examples. They both have predetermined circles on the ground where you purchase items that are auto placed, and you manage between getting Econ and new fun weapons to defend your base with. Of course, I believe y’all will make a much better game, but if you want to see what that style looks like currently, it might be worth looking at
Hurdy Gurdy. There was a time medieval music loved the unending sound. So you can look into Hurdy Gurdy music on YT.
Next Up: Jonas will introduce AI enemies in tower defense that learn as the days pass and exploit your weaknesses
This actually looks promising!
It would be cool if you save up gold you get a return on it so you have to choose between greed and defence
What's the song used that starts at 1:28? Also, great dev log! Very interesting process.
Yo nice it looks like the game “kingdom” fused with “vampire survivors” and I think you should go for that approach, and copy what they did good and improve what you think they did bad, but so far so good!
What a great jump! looks great! I do not know if it occur to you but what if the main character will function as the old ones, such as the characters in the cards, with their own deck of benefits that every day you can decide whether to reshufel the hand or leave it the same. I hope development goes well.
That music sounds great
My main question is: what makes this game unique? Why should I play y'all's game as opposed to any of the other thousands of tower defense games (or even programming one myself)? WYS was a platformer, but with an AI predicting your movements and spawning traps. What's the unique twist for your game?
Well, the twist would be this ebb and flow of building and upgrading vs shooting and defending. The concept does have potential, given that they can execute it well. I would like to see some good graphics and lot's of juice in the combat portion.
Though you were going to say that the game turned into a plot to assassinate an important politician.
damn, really excited
6:37 I NEVER regret eating Nutella out of the jar.
Fair. :D
I’ve always thought a multiplayer player tower defense game would be fun but never found one I enjoyed.
They did it! They reinvented Kingdoms: Two Crowns.
A singleplayer clash of clans type game? Love it
Nice and inspiring story
1:18 try using a medieval scale like dorian or mixolydian. They also overused the 5th a lot in medieval music.
Thanks for the tips. Will look into that.
the current version looks so promising! love these videos. If this was somehow multiplayer, with each person managing their own little town, I would play that game all day! Sunken Defense from StarCraft was the best tower defence game imho
The main issue is that you haven't done enough pen'n'paper prototyping as a board game so you could elevate it into a video game. That is deckbuilding in the first place - a board game, played by a physical cards
Great video
very cool
My birthday is today and this is by far the best part of my day
Happy birthday! :)
I always use a dorian scale for a medieval sound
6:27 this game looks insanely cool !
Maybe somethink like Plants vs Zombies you could make
off course making it with other ideas .
This game looks very enjoyable and flowy .
Would like to see what you would add more in this game !
Maybe we'll make it at some point. :D
Hey! Nice vid! Just a little photoshop tip. You can go select-subject instead of cropping the backgrounds by hand. Hope it helps!
Neat. New AI features everywhere. Thanks for the tip.
@@JonasTyroller Any time.
that was really unexpected