Author: Rabbit Head Demon King
introduction
The concept of tower defense games was born in the early craze of homemade maps represented by StarCraft and Warcraft at the beginning of the century, and basically laid many important elements as the foundation of tower defense games. In just 20 years of development, tower defense games have given birth to many distinctive branches.
(War3 can't lose its tower defense, just as the West can't lose Jerusalem.)
In 2021, in the China Indieplay Competition, a tower defense game broke through the siege and won the first place in the best student work.
This game is "Reconstruction", under the "Reconstruction" technology and simple style, its creativity is derived from the most classic variant of the "Star 2" tower defense map - gem TD. The core gameplay is that the use of randomly refreshed towers in the store is freely laid on the large map, and the number and position of the towers can be adjusted at any time through synthetic upgrades between towers of the same type by rationally constructing defense units and designing the enemy's travel route with a high degree of freedom.
Creative new experiments
Turning back to Refactoring, the game, in addition to fully inheriting the main gameplay of this variant, also cleverly integrates the Rougelike element into the game mechanics: not only are the purchasable towers randomly refreshed, but the high-level defense towers selected by the reconstruction system are also randomly refreshed as the number of turns accumulates.
If it is just a simple random refresh of the tower, the number of combinations is not huge, and the game mechanism that makes "Refactoring" interesting and more hardcore is its layout construction and attribute matching two major mechanisms.
(Derived from tetris base motif)
Layout construction is also one of the mechanisms that constitute the important concept of "long-term planning" of the entire game, each defense tower you buy will be randomly matched with a graphical base, the enemy can only move within the grid with the base, what the player needs to do is to use the building of the base to expand the opening 3x3 size "H" layout, extending the enemy's travel route.
Similarly, traps with different effects will be randomly generated on the map, which greatly improves the difficulty of planning, but also makes the tower defense game burst into new fires.
On the one hand, it is necessary to design the enemy's travel route, and on the other hand, it is also necessary to take into account that the route can cover most of the traps, and the traps with strong control ability can also be properly concentrated in the firepower. If the plan is not reasonable, the defense will be very difficult, and if the layout is laid out in advance with a long-term vision, it will be easy.
The gradual development from a 3x3 map to a complete large map is also one of the biggest cool spots of this game.
(Rational planning of routes, maximum efficiency use map)
Layout planning, route planning, firepower planning, these three elements constitute the core gameplay of the game "Reconstruction", if only one of them is taken into account, it is difficult to go far. If you want to achieve higher grades, you may even need to bring your own grid book or Excel form to design the route plan in advance.
However, these three plans do not exist in isolation, you first need to fill the map before planning the route, and before planning the firepower deployment, you need to plan the route according to random terrain and traps. The planning and design of these three aspects are complementary to each other, and they need to be constantly played and tried and wrong to achieve one step and three calculations.
(Legend Excel table route design)
Changeable gameplay
The most noteworthy thing about "Refactoring" is the element and skill mechanism, and the basic defense towers available for purchase in the game are divided into five elements: gold, wood, water, fire and earth. After using the "Refactoring" system to synthesize the three base towers into a more advanced "refactoring tower", the original base tower will be converted into the corresponding element beads, providing attribute bonuses for the "refactoring tower". The refactored towers are transformed into more powerful turrets with different elemental attributes and passive effects, such as cannon cannon, scatter tower, rapid cannon, rotor cannon, and so on.
Whether it's the base element tower you draw or the recipe for crafting and reconstructing the tower on the left, these will all be random each time you open the level. You can choose to upgrade the system to increase the probability of drawing a high-level element tower, or you can use it to re-follow the element tower to see if you can brush out the one you want to use for reconstruction.
(Legend Five elements and a refactored tower with random skills)
The stacking bonus mechanism between "Refactoring Towers" enhances the playability of this elemental system: up to three Refactoring Towers can be placed on top of each other, and their Elemental Beads and Passive Skills are superimposed on top of the original Refactoring Tower.
(For example, the superposition of two turrets in Figure 1 and Figure 2 will become a new turret in Figure 3 with elemental values and skill accumulation)
The different elements also offer five different bonuses: gold provides 20% base attack, wood provides 15% base rate of fire, water provides 20% freezing, fire provides 5% critical hit, and earth provides 15% sputter. This means that different types of turrets need to be paired with different skills and specialize in one of the two elements to achieve the highest return.
Being able to combine interesting ideas in an orderly manner, allowing a series of uncomplicated mechanics to fuse into a hardcore developable space, is one of the great things about Refactoring as a tower defense game. Let the tower defense, which looks at the backplane of the raider and then passes the game step by step, has to a certain extent given a new machine, giving tower defense enthusiasts a higher upper limit and thinking space.
"Refactoring" is both interesting and hardcore, and even meets the needs of players at different levels, whether it is a mild player who likes to experience fresh gameplay, or a hardcore player who will explore the game mechanics, or even a hardcore player who will constantly refresh the score, can find the fun of the game.
Perhaps, this is what a tower defense game should do, creating unlimited possibilities with limited defense units. Refactoring even incorporates Rougelike gameplay to create a more complex and massive combination of defense units. Although as an indie game, it is inevitable that there will be oversights in the design, but the studio has always maintained the optimization speed of a few days at this stage, which is very encouraging.
The game's inadequacies
Finally, let's take a look at the shortcomings of the game, the current game level content is still less, only the standard mode of six levels leads to the difficulty curve is not smooth enough. Because the front is a teaching level, the difficulty is not high, and the endless mode that focuses on the hardcore direction requires players to pay more time to continuously learn and trial and error, which is more suitable for hardcore players.
Some skill designs are also lagging behind, within the framework of Rougelike, any design should serve the diversification of choices, according to this theory, tower defense games that pursue DPS (damage per second) priority should not appear such as gold elements (increase attack power) and wood elements (increase rate of fire) these two elements of the solid color skills. Because these two skills are stacked, they can provide 3 gold and 3 wood element bonuses, and the effect of the two skills is more terrifying, and can provide an additional bonus of 1 gold and 1 wood. These two skills can just make up for the shortcomings of the scattering tower's insufficient rate of fire, easily create an output machine, and turn the original changeable routine into a single goal pursuit.
Of course, this problem may not be discovered until a long time after the player, and it does not affect the pre-game experience in itself.
Cured of years of hypotension, the right side of the element tower will be deducted and can not be canceled, you do not know what element tower will appear to look at the face completely, in addition to the inability to recover resources is also a problem, once caught in the lack of resources of the deadlock, the best way is probably to reopen.
epilogue
The short history of tower defense games for more than 20 years is actually the process of constantly introducing new concepts to enrich the game content with the most original tower defense concept as the core. Just like what Refactoring does, extract the most essential resource operation and defense planning elements of traditional tower defense games, and effectively pass the fun of tower defense into the hands of players. It is believed that in the near future, "Refactoring" will also continue to update and improve the game content, or open the creative workshop, which can bring players a better game experience.
This is a very creative and groundbreaking tower defense game, which is well worth trying out for tower defense enthusiasts.
I'm the rabbit head and we'll see you next time.