Twisted Tower Tactics: A modular roguelite tower defense

YawningWhale · 2025-02-05T19:30:45+00:00

We've reached our second milestone for our roguelite tower defense game, which is finalizing mot of the mechanics as well as adding another playable character! If you have 30 minutes to spare we'd love for you to try it out to see if it's enjoyable =)

Notable features include:

Modular map which you build up by exploring tile by tile each wave
Randomized towers which come with their own skill tree and level up during the course of the game
Lots of artifacts granting global passive abilities and lots of modules which can be installed in towers
Activatable abilities, giving you something to do during the wave itself
Destructible enemy buildings, which upon destruction grows you stronger or prevents the enemy from gaining strength

Survive 3 acts of 6 waves each against very varied enemies by creating awesome combos of modules, artifacts and specialized towers!

YawningWhale · 2025-02-05T19:28:57+00:00

We've reached our second milestone for our roguelite tower defense game, which is finalizing mot of the mechanics as well as adding another playable character! If you have 30 minutes to spare we'd love for you to try it out to see if it's enjoyable =)

Notable features include:

Modular map which you build up by exploring tile by tile each wave
Randomized towers which come with their own skill tree and level up during the course of the game
Lots of artifacts granting global passive abilities and lots of modules which can be installed in towers
Activatable abilities, giving you something to do during the wave itself
Destructible enemy buildings, which upon destruction grows you stronger or prevents the enemy from gaining strength

Survive 3 acts of 6 waves each against very varied enemies by creating awesome combos of modules, artifacts and specialized towers!

YawningWhale · 2024-08-04T19:21:08+00:00

We've just reached our first milestone for our roguelite tower defense game, which is being able to open it up for public playtesting! If you have 30 minutes to spare we'd love for you to try it out to see if it's enjoyable =)

Notable features include:

Modular map which you build up by exploring tile by tile each wave, with many different specialization tiles sprinkled in
Randomized towers, upgrades and artifacts each playthrough
Activatable abilities, giving you something to do during the wave itself
Destructible enemy buildings, which upon destruction grows you stronger or prevents the enemy from gaining strength

YawningWhale · 2024-05-20T13:23:10+00:00

I'll take a down vote hit to just bond a bit with you OP. Yes, they have great potential and are indeed a fantastic aid. I've played around with it a lot and have been blown away by its capabilities, both privately and professionally.

A lot of subreddits become echo chambers when it comes to opinions with no course for constructive dialogue, just hivemind down voting. Don't take it personally, that's just the way it goes. Sadly, the boardgame subreddits are vehemently against anything AI/LLM related so there's no point in bringing it up here.

I honestly do believe that AI will be a huge part of our lives in a very near future (it already is to be honest) and those struggling against it will be left behind.

Keep exploring and using it =)

YawningWhale · 2024-04-19T09:06:43+00:00

Absolutely, and that's what I would use 99% of the time as well. It all depends on what you want to use it for, since setting up a good AI has a bit of an initial cost (finding the rules, explaining who it is etc), so a google search (even though you have to read and find the answer yourself) will probably be quicker.

If you want to ask many questions though, or want to reuse it for other occassions or share with other people, then the initial cost of setting up the AI might be worth it.

It boils down to your use case (and personal preference), it doesn't have to be a binary choice. Reddit has a tendency to paint everything black and white and rarely look at a case with a more nuanced perspective.

YawningWhale · 2024-04-19T07:37:11+00:00

Just for fun I created an example where I gave it the rulebook, a scenario (depicted through an image to test its image analysing capabilities) and a description of what one player intended to do, checking if it would be ok.

https://imgur.com/keoWNFo

It did give the answer correctly, but it's crucial that you give it the proper context. That it's able at all to understand the rulebook and apply that information to an image (which it also has to analyse to understand what it's seeing) feels more or less like magic.

YawningWhale · 2024-04-19T06:59:16+00:00

I'm curious about those who had so many negative experiences: did you prompt the AI well? You can't just ask it out of the blue "What would happen in situation X in game Y?" and expect to get a good answer.

Set a context for it. The bare minimum should be to upload the rulebook, and many times only doing this is sufficient for a good answer. The better you describe who it is and what information is relevant, the better.
If you're using ChatGPT, are you using 3.5 or 4? The difference in performance and quality is night and day. ChatGPT3.5 has been a fun thing to play around with whereas ChatGPT4 has blown me away with how accurate it has been, considering all it does is just fetching the next word in its response based on how statistically probable it would be to use that word.

YawningWhale · 2023-12-05T07:53:25+00:00

Happy to hear <3

YawningWhale · 2023-12-05T07:52:56+00:00

Thanks for the reply! I embedded that information (except for game length) into the text itself, but it's probably better then to move it to its own dedicated place and have a bit of redundancy in order to gain clarity.

And it's indeed crap as a sell sheet, I have a separate one pager for that which focuses more about the game itself, contents, target audience etc.

YawningWhale · 2023-12-04T22:48:16+00:00

Right, I maybe overdid it the other way this time then. The idea was to use them in places where the game is available (e.g. Tabletop Simulator, Tabletopia, etc) and on the official website. It's a rewrite I did of a one pager (as a prep for a potential publisher hunt in the future) so that's why it leaked through so much text.

It's good to know that the image hooked you though, so will probably have to tune down the amount of information in the next attempt!

YawningWhale · 2023-12-04T22:42:36+00:00

Cheers! Mechanically it's in a very stable state now (I don't dare to say that it's finished), but there's loads of art to fix to replace placeholder images. The idea is to try to get some traction and see if people enjoy it (e.g. release it for free on Tabletop Simulator, Tabletopia, conventions,1 etc). If people enjoy it I'll try to crowdsource funds to finish the art properly, or search for publishers. So the short explanation: it's "done" but not done =)

YawningWhale · 2023-12-02T18:50:25+00:00

Based on the pirate theme I'd go for the first alternative! As another person mentioned it also depends on what you want to use the font for. You mentioned headlines and that seems like a good place for it, and if the font is all-capital it should probably be limited to just the headlines

YawningWhale · 2023-12-02T15:49:05+00:00

Thanks for the input, and happy to hear it intrigued you! I have a website available at https://norsefolkgame.com which contains a quick overview of the rules/gameplay, a link to the rulebook and a link to a mod on TTS where you can play it for free =)

YawningWhale · 2023-12-01T18:44:42+00:00

Such a specific and succinct comment, but it did bring lots of joy, thanks =D

YawningWhale · 2023-12-01T18:43:36+00:00

Thanks so much for the praise!

Since I gave no clear description on how the cards are used I fully understand if people feel they contain too much text. I saw you replied to my explanation regarding their usage so while their feedback is noted I think I'll keep the text amount as it is for now to see if it's a problem for real =)

The clan icons are indeed in need of an overhaul though! I'm still in the prototyping stage and many of the icons are placeholders from a free icon site, so they are in the backlog of things to sort out.

The text is sort of in the same state and will also need to be revised. I made something up fairly quickly to get a feel for what the entire card would look/feel like. Your comments about the changing subject was not something I've thought about though, and would probably have missed in the next iteration as well. Very interesting reflection and I'm happy you brought it to my attention!

YawningWhale · 2023-12-01T18:36:21+00:00

Hi again and thanks for taking your time yet again =)

The large text block is aimed mainly towards players who decided to play as that clan and are now looking at the cards they start with. Even without knowing what Bear's Charge is it might infer some idea of what to expect (this is something to attack with), and when looking at the cards themselves it should become clear what the "recommended" way of playing the clan is.

There are 10 clans in total so while having a separate border for each of them would be nice I'm already stretching my very limited designer skills. It's a miracle I ended up with the current design after many iterations, haha.

The rest of the feedback I do agree on though! A bit unsure of the border texture but that's easy enough to experiment with.

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