onewinter games

This is the seventh post in an ongoing series about the development of my thesis project, Clockwork TD.

In previous devlog entries, I covered the initial development of the map. This fall, I got some good feedback from playtesters on gameplay progression, including a very important question: “why would you want to close spawn tiles?” To my mind, closing spawn tiles was sort of self-evident: you want more space between where the enemies spawn and your home tower, so of course you’d want to keep closing spawn tiles! However, I needed to add a mechanic to force the player to engage with this system–and so, the Pressure gauge was born. The Pressure gauge increasing makes the game harder, but increases player rewards; closing a spawn tile releases Pressure, letting the player have some breathing room again.

Initially, the Pressure gauge increased when the player did damage, and decreased slightly with each enemy spawned; the problem with that the player’s damage is wildly unforecastable (and increasingly so as the game goes on). Instead, the Pressure gauge simply increases with enemies spawned, which makes the max pressure amount much easier to grow consistently as the game goes on.

But what to do with Pressure? At the time, the player received choices from two drawn card hands at the end of each round; the higher the Pressure, the higher the minimum reward rarity of the cards drawn (more pressure, better rewards). This could tend to lead to mindless clicking at the end of each round, though, as players eagerly attempted to get to the next enemy attack phase.

So, let’s slow the player down: give them a mini-store at the end of each round, and let them choose which areas they want to strengthen with their available currency (this is a roguelike, after all!)

For the players who’d rather just build more towers, let’s give them a currency exchange too:

The effects of Pressure itself went through multiple iterations: at first, it simply changed the number of enemies spawned. However, this generally wouldn’t be enough to change the math on a player’s defenses, and would simply lead to the player racking up a huge amount of gold as they mowed enemies down. I briefly flirted with having it also affect the spacing between spawns, which would disrupt the timing of the player defenses; but this just led to the lanes looking like a muddled mess once Pressure was high enough, and also negatively impacted performance (too many colliders too close together, is my guess). Finally, I settled on using the same stat mechanics as the enemies themselves do: boosting HP & speed. This, coupled with a toned down version of the spacing changes and the increased spawn count changes, led to a system where the difference Pressure makes slowly creeps up until all of a sudden you bite off more than you can chew and are punished for it. At that point, if you manage to survive, you will definitely be closing spawn tiles and relieving Pressure! If not, then you’ll have a better feel for how Pressure affects the game on your next run.

The final changes with Pressure involve the spawners themselves; original Pressure iterations had Pressure above 67% and 95% leading to the player dealing with 2 and 3 enemy spawners, respectively. This was both an attempt to keep the game from getting too predictable with a single spawner, and another way to try and make the player feel the effects of too much Pressure. Eventually, however, I realized that this locked multi-spawners away behind a Pressure level that some players may never experience. Instead, multi-spawn is now a counterbalance to sealing spawn tiles and growing the map; each time the player pushes the map out a level, the number of spawners is permanently increased by one. So, constantly avoiding dealing with Pressure means that you’ll instead have to deal with more attack vectors–so pick your poison!