Early prototype of Tower Defense game – XNA

Here’s the first look at the Tower Defense game that I’ve been building. It’s still in the early stages, but there’s quite a bit of the nitty gritty groundwork that’s already been done. There’s only one level at the moment, but it’s loaded from the content pipeline and can easily be replaced with a different level. Waves are also loaded in the same fashion, and since they’re defined in XML, they can be added very easily.

The path finding works reasonably well. It still needs to be tweaked a bit as sometimes the monsters “get lost” and go off the grid. There’s also some issues right when towers are bought and paths needs to be recalculated. Targeting is also working pretty good, as the towers predict the position of the monsters and shoot where they think they’ll be. I still need to adjust the range though, as the towers aim and shoot for targets that are further away than what they can hit.

There’s some very basic particle stuff going on. If the monsters die they’ll explode and scatter a bunch of stars around. If they reach the exit and the player loses a life some small red hearts will rise from the exit.

Other than that towers take a few seconds to build, depending on the tower. Later I’m going to also include upgrading towers, which will function in a similar fashion. Obviously there also needs to be more towers and monsters, with different abilities.

The game is currently only builds on the PC, but I might also try and port it to Windows Phone 7 (which shouldn’t be hard).