Waves of changes

When I decided I wanted to implement infinite waves, as most traditional tower defenses do, I realized that the messy, quickly-cobbled-together mechanism I made to manually define incoming waves of enemies could not remain for much longer.

It was hard to understand, required too much manual work, and on top of it all, it kinda made the game a bit too intense. Rounds would come one after the other regardless of player progress. Plus, one could not call in waves early for that risk-reward mechanic. The whole thing needed to change.

So, after creating around 8 different interfaces, and refactoring an entire dependency out of another dependency, I managed to make a nice, modular and reusable wave system, that let me predefine some wave patterns, and then use them when making a story-mode level, also being able to apply overrides to increase (or decrease) health and speed. All things which the randomizer would benefit – as I intend it to send predefined waves (and some random ones too) in a random order, increasing the enemy health with each wave.

I rewrote all the waves for all the levels. Did a ton of dumb work; but I finally got it to behave. 

My codebase was ready for the big feature of an Arcade mode with infinite waves. But before adding new features, I finally could address some old placeholders...

The soundtrack: It's here! And it's dynamic

I always looked up to the Doom 2016 dynamic soundtrack implementation, so I wanted to make the music in Recolonizer change with what was happening in the level. I figured matching the music with the build/defend cycle, specifying the "defend" music to match the identity and vibe of the attacking force somehow.

And through the beautiful itch.io community, I found someone willing to do it. He insisted on contributing without any compensation. I took him up on the offer, and the result was pretty awesome. Here's how he did it:

"The first building block for me is always the main melody. These come quite easily to me, usually while walking my dog. (The hard part is keeping it in mind till I can sit down at my computer next!) If it makes it that far, the pieces usually snowball from there; rhythm is usually next, backing/harmony instruments follow. An extra step for recolonizer is deciding which instruments should take over the main melody depending on which enemy is attacking the player. We kept the instruments choices regional to reflect each enemy."

– Ryan McLeod, Composer

The guy is awesome! You can see more of his work here.

Credit where it's due...

As I finally have someone else contributing to the content of the game, I also added a credits screen! Hooray!

I am releasing this version because it already has a lot of good stuff, even though the real version 2.9 should come out only when I have the randomizer figured out and working nicely, along with the "call wave early" mechanic and UI fully done. Get hyped!

Go play and tell me what you think about the new wave balance, soundtrack, and credits screen! 

PLAY NOW