I had hoped to finish the prototype today, after setting out an ambitious to-do list that looked like this:

• Implement all the special abilities on the Base Defence game
• Allow turret to target tiles and destroy them after several shots.
• Allow special abilities to be cast on puzzle tiles also.
• Implement the effects of the enemy buff tiles.
• Levelling up system at X amount of XP/Points to upgrade your base.

The prototype finishing line was in sight… oh how naive of me! It was a successfull day, but I spent the vast majority of the day implementing the special abilities that can be used to defend your base! It took a lot longer than anticipated, but was very enjoyable and challenging. Some of the main challenges were thinking how to get the different parts of the game to interact with eachother in a healthy way. But alas - here we are - special abilities working as intended:

I then went on to work on the turrets being able to shoot the puzzle tiles. This again was a complex matter for 2 reason: 1) it involved multiple different independent aspects of the game interacting with eachother and 2) I’d already been streaming for about 12 hours…!

To summarise the implementation: there is a button you press to toggle on "attack tile mode". This is only available when the puzzle game is in a "ready for input" state. When you toggle attack mode on, your turret stops it’s selected defence strategy (i.e. who it shoots at) and awaits an order to shoot a puzzle tile. Your next click on a puzzle tile will start the turret dealing it’s regular damage to a tile at it’s standard attack speed. The tile has X health, and if a tile isn’t on maxHealth, it will display a coloured square to indicate it’s health. The only way to cancel this action is to untoggle the attack tile mode button. You are therefore able to leave tiles partially damaged if you desire. When tile is destroyed, any tiles that need to drop as a result will do so. The turret resumes it’s previous defence strategy automatically upon toggling the button off or destroying a tile.

Tomorrow, abilities affecting tiles. I’m hoping this adds the final big gameplay change to the game. After that it’s a case of empowering the orcs, adding the ranged and boss enemies, and implementing the levelling system that will allow you to upgrade your base in various ways.

ONWARDS AND … HORIZONTALLY!!