[ «« Back to Front ]

Gameplay Mechanics

Every good game has multiple mechanics that provide for an objective, a way to reach that objective, and then tension (something that fights against the player). In this game, we will implement these mechanics in the form of the Town, Defense, and Pillager mechanics.

The game itself will be timed. You will be able to speed it up or slow it down from the default speed (and perhaps suffer a point penalty/bonus for doing so) as well as pause the game. A typical game will look like:

1. Initial free build period
2. Initial wave of enemies
3. Pause to allow building, repairing, rebuilding, etc
4. Repeat from step 2: note pause length and units sent varies as the game continues, leading to one of the following conditions:
   • WIN: User defeats all waves of enemies and the town survives.
   • LOSE: User's town is demolished and all peasants killed.

Town Mechanics

Resources are created through the town. In effect, your peasants use their free time to till the fields, harvest wood, mine ore, and do other things that you would expect peasants to do. (Procreation!)

Peaseants can only do things when they are not doing other things. Basically, if you have them shuffling around building fortifications, they will be busy depleting resources and not producing new ones. Yet if you let them spend too much time generating resources, you won't be able to adequately defend yourself from later groups of pillagers.

You don't have much direct control over the town. It does what it wants based on how much time it has. You can control its growth and output simply by how hard you work your peasants. In this way it should provide an easily understood mechanic that you don't have to directly control.

Defense Mechanics

Your town must be defended - that is the point of the game. To this end, you can build various defenses. There should be enough variety to the types of defensive functions available to allow the user to choose their own path to victory, but not so many that we end up feeling like Total Annihilation with 500 units.

In this game, there should be several classes of defenses to provide the user with some variety. Static defenses such as walls and towers are the norm, but the user could also build military. This would require an interesting balance, as the military pulls from your peasants in a strong way, but are mobile and perhaps stronger.

Pillager Mechanics

There are two lines of thought for the pillagers: typical TD style, or more interesting.

The typical TD games use enemies that don't do anything except try to get from point A to point B. This makes for an interesting game, sure, but it's hardly the most exciting.

A more interesting line of thought would be to make the pillagers have the ability to fight back. Depending on what type of enemy you have at a particular time, they would have different abilities to damage your fortifications, military, and town.