Our Minimalist Base Defense Game is Taking Shape! (Devlog)

this is throne fall I'm an evil based defense game where during the day you build and upgrade your castle and at night you defend your walls against waves of enemies we are Paul and Jonas indie game developers by heart and nature and we've been working on this game for precisely 64 days so far I know that because I'm recording and documenting every single day we're working on this game you can check out the previous three parts of this devlog series on my YouTube channel in this video we're gonna make a bunch more progress so better have a close look because you're not gonna be able to recognize the game by the end of the video anymore in Throne fall at the moment you can't choose what to build where you can only choose when to build it because there are these predefined build slots for example this Mill and these fields here will generate some income every day once you're ready you call the Knight and defend against the wave of enemies with a very basic combat system that basically just requires you to spam one button on the keyboard the next morning you collect your taxes and use them to build even more buildings and the cycle continues till eventually fight some epic battles in and around your castle fortifications one thing we want to do with roundfall is eliminating a bunch of frustration points that

players would usually have with these kinds of Base defense games so for example one thing we're doing is we're respawning all of the buildings for free in the morning so you never have to spend money on repairing anything or something like that so the next thing you can see me work on right here is making your units respawn as well and they should even do so at night because your units are all gonna run in and die like the idiots they are and then if it's just you left defending the castle that looks a little weird so we definitely want a constant stream of units to kind of keep the action going after a little bit I got that working so now as long as your barracks is alive it will keep pumping out reinforcements I made it so whenever you die you get a 10 second respawn timer so all in all it's very forgiving and we'll just counterbalance that by making other parts of the game more difficult speaking of which as all of the main gameplay systems were complete now it was time to get a little overview over all of the numbers and get started with the balancing which is a process I enjoy very much because it allows me to be creative but it's also very mathematical and logical at the same time there's generally some really simple formulas you can use to CFA Unit is overpowered

or underpowered so that helps you to get a rough estimate but there are also a couple of factors that are not as easily quantifiable like for example how much is it worth that a unit can respawn or what's the value of having additional attack range what's the value of movement speed then on top of that we want to add another layer of unique strengths and weaknesses to each unit so at that point the only way to realistically get anywhere is to play the game a lot a common misconception people have about balancing is that it's about making everything equally powerful whereas it's actually not about that at all balancing in strategy games is way more about carving out a niche for everything and making everything situational or in other words all of the tools you give the player should be useful at least some of the time otherwise what's the point of putting them in the game so while Paul was doing some actual development work I was just repeatedly playing the game over and over and over in order to improve some numbers okay First Act of the day you can always see the attack indicator now and then second act of the day was to add back enzyme custom post processing that allowed us to put a gradient on top

of everything at this point you can see we're still experimenting with the visuals and haven't really set it on anything yet we also started play testing with some friends oh yeah in the morning I checked out some unit models Paul makes the ogre I feel like the ogre should have wider shoulders or something this is the melee unit the hunterling Catapult is not still work in progress this song is a low here the wish to be able to dodge a rose yeah this is slow here you can see a sword through the first round of plate as the feedback color coding everything depending on the priority of the task at this point our main priority is really to get the gameplay right game developers always say fix fun first hey joking nobody says that I just made that up I I think I think we should say that yeah yeah addressing feedback

feedback in the unit count so battles feel more epic latest has also wanted to be able to build an entire wallet once instead of having to build individual wall pieces so voila that works meanwhile Paul is updating more and more of the art whenever you watch fast-paced DEATH looks like this remember that reality looks more like this you just stare at the screen trying to figure out the source of back and the reason I want to mention that is because I do want to paint a realistic picture of what game death is like again again again again create all of the little things we speed through in these Dev Vlogs are usually paid for with a lot of sweat and tears next up I started work on a mesh generator tool for making paths and instead of explaining what I mean I'm just gonna show you you can define a path by placing a couple of points and you can also Define the width of the path at each point I added some features to smooth out the paths a little bit so now we can build some pretty paths

directly in unity without leaving Unity which is a big advantage [Music] thank you [Music] 71 days already time really flies I spontaneously had another cool idea where I could use my path system for because I thought if you scroll a texture over it it could probably look almost like a river it was about time to replace those crappy placeholder Rivers anyway Paul built some pretty scenery and sent me a screenshot I tried for a

while longer to make the paths look somewhat acceptable but it was more difficult than expected let's just leave the visual stuff to Paul and go back to designing some gameplay systems the next gameplay system I wanted to work on was The Meta progression so I have two ideas for progression systems and one progression system you can pick different perks different weapons unblock stuff and there are lots of basically different perks and weapons to choose from so there are lots and lots of possibilities to recombine them and the other system I had in mind is where you should just choose a character and the characters all have different perks and abilities I'm not entirely sure what I find more interesting after Consulting with Paul we decided to go with the perk system as that would probably allow for more replayability and had couple of other advantages as well for example we originally planned to have two difficulties normal and nightmare but with the perk system we can just have a couple of perks that make the game more difficult for example enemies have more Health but you get more points and more experience and that way we don't need difficulty settings anymore which is fantastic I just made some extra perks

as you can see there are quite a lot now I'm confused makes the fields more expensive but they also give more income walls and towers are sturdier Castle Center produces gold so there are lots of cool strategic options to choose from now my next big construction site were screen markers because we initially had this text at the bottom here which told you about which enemies will spawn where in the next night and this was actually not meant to be a placeholder we were really like maybe that's a cool opportunity for some light storytelling or something our play testers were like screw that I don't read text so now we're adding little icons which as we've already Learned was is that doing that definitely paid for with a lot of threat and tears but also as always if you try for long enough you eventually get it working and to spend like another entire day on making sure these markers merge themselves into cute little groups like that as you can see Paul found a nice solution for the paths uh just one big path in the middle and that's it speaking of parts I had another incredible idea on something I wanted to try with my pathing tool um it's not

doing that but now it's working and now I can super easily build Clips right in unity so on all of the levels I built from now on I can make use of the third dimension at the path points I can move them around if I want to and I can even undo ha incredible and I built a little Bridge here as you can see which I think is very cool so even the little Bridge here even that is filled with the path maker I made I didn't build it with this in mind but it turns out to be like extremely useful for level design I can block these things out so much better than with stupid little cubes not sure if you've guessed already but what I'm building here is that tutorial it starts out by telling you how to move then it tells you how to attack and you gotta destroy all of these test dummies here to get your first three coins which you can then use to build your Castle Center you learned that at night there are enemies you have to defend against learn that you have to build houses or Mills to get

a better economy and you learn that collecting taxes is a lot of work and I learned that units are still not freaking doing what they're supposed to when there's a wall in their way very sad I thought I was done with that this is me testing if you can die in the tutorial if you play as bad as humanly possible and I don't think it's possible to lose here every good tutorial needs some massive arrows showing you where to go so I added that which was nice because I could reuse the screen marker system I made earlier here's a little more tutorial time lapse [Music] I can't quite believe it either but I found yet another fantastic use case for my pathing system and that is for level boundaries cause for performance reasons we don't want to give every single object in the scene like a collider or something we need something to prevent the player from leaving the play area and this really gets the job done we can

no longer ride into the mountain that is a let's play a round off can you guess what Jonas is building here can you guess can you guess can you guess can you guess can you guess yeah okay it's a level select screen I'm more or less just watching this with you right now and I'm like damn yeah yeah right I did that as well whenever match ends you get directed to this epic reward screen where you get some XP and unlock some new perks or you know to explain it to the fortnite generation it's a free battle pass so now that we've got our way to earn perks and weapons we also need a way to select them before the match so I built this quick mock-up UI which doesn't work yet now it works you can see I'm only able to select one up here and I'm only able to select two down here and of course if you haven't unlocked something yet it shouldn't show up one thing you gotta know about me is I'm a nerd so I wanted to have an analytics screen after the game and that means I may run for

everyday I work on this game I just feel myself falling in love with it more and more and this has happened before with my two previous games this happened with Islanders this happened with will you snail but it's happening again now for throne fall I'm just utterly in love with this game and I'm so grateful that I get to work on this with Paul if you want to support us the best way to do so is to wishlist thrown fall on Steam right now there's a link to the game in the description which listing is of course entirely free and all it does is it makes sure you get notified when the game comes out let's take a second to remember where we started this video and you know where we started the video before that another video before that where it all started with some very silly prototypes