Tower Defense Games
Tower Defense Games or TD Games are essentially a sub-genre of strategy games. The TD Game genre is generally comprised of a human player who allocates resources to build 'Towers' in order to prevent enemies (commonly referred to as 'creeps') from passing through the human players map. In order to succeed in the TD Game genre, human players have to allocate resources in order to build defensive towers. These towers have the ability to shoot, damage, halt, and eliminate creeps from the map. Each eliminated creep results in gained resources, these resources are then stockpiled by the human player to buy more towers, or upgrade current ones. Winning is usually defined as surviving the onslaught of creeps (The human's towers eliminate all (or a sizable portion) of the creeps) and losing is defined as the creeps reaching the end of the map before your towers have a chance to take them out.[1] TD Games are usually very easy to pick up however hard to master.
TD Games can be simple or complex, turn-based or real-time and they all involve some sort of strategic approach.[2]
Elements
Phillipa Avery describes the 5 elements that combine to comprise an example of the TD Game.
Terrain
The map. Users can strategically place their towers on any part of the map. This map is usually comprised of two elements, the path and the area surrounding the path. Creeps travel along the path through the map. Towers can be placed anywhere on the terrain that is not on the path. Maps can change through different levels.
- Http://i.stack.imgur.com/BFjwi.png
Example of a TD map. The Path is the light brown portion of the map.
Towers
Creeps
Reward Systems
Single or Multi-player
History
The Tower Defense Game genre is relatively young in the world of gaming. The TD Game genre finds its beginnings in 1990, with an arcade game released by Atari Games titled Rampart. The large success of Rampart caused the game to be released on a wide variety of platforms including Game Boy, Super NES, Playstation, Xbox, and more. [3] The success of the Tower Defense model generated significant buzz in the gaming community and eventually influenced the creation of custom maps that adopted the TD Game Model for mainstream computer games such as Starcraft, Age of Empires II, and Warcraft III. [4] As noted in Phillipa Avery's text, Computational Intelligence and Tower Defence Games, "One of the most popular versions of these [tower defense model-based maps], and arguably the original true TD style game was the Tower Defense maps for the Warcraft III expansion The Frozen Throne."
Examples
Significance
References
- ↑ Avery, Phillipa, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Nevada, Reno, USA, http://julian.togelius.com/Avery2011Computational.pdf
- ↑ Avery, Phillipa, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Nevada, Reno, USA, http://julian.togelius.com/Avery2011Computational.pdf
- ↑ Soos, David http://ezinearticles.com/?History-of-Tower-Defense-Games&id=7241055
- ↑ Soos, David http://ezinearticles.com/?History-of-Tower-Defense-Games&id=7241055
