😈 Nine Steps Down

about

A tower defence game (with a twist!) available for download on itch.io. It has also been covered by SuomiGameHUB.

code

The game randomly generates a board and uses AStar pathfinding to decide the route the enemies should take. Additionally, the players can place arrows as forced chokepoints to divert the route.

The player character can pick up any tower even during gameplay and move it to a new spot.

There is also a speed-up option in the game. And run history!

ui

One of the cool UI bits I got to do was an upgrade menu that popped up after each level. Every tower had its own icon, name, status icons, description, and flavour text. Pretty neat!

Here’s the two types of build menus the player had access to: one on the right sidebar, and one directly on the field. Each one had its own quality-of-life additions; the former had an option to right-click a tower to pin the view, and the latter took into account the right-most and bottom-most tiles and spawned to the left and top respectively if summoned too close to the edge.

I also made a custom hand-drawn font called Polárka for the game and coded some speech bubbles. Radical!

art & animation

There is so much, so I’ll just pick out my favourites. Here’s the tower icons:

I’m also very proud of the different tower visuals and little idle animations. They even have their own personalised sprite sections which show how charged their next shot is!

audio

I made two variations of a single track for the game, and I won’t sugarcoat it, it’s not good, I’m not happy with it. It was my first finished music track ever though, so I don’t fault myself too much for that.

retrospection

what did i do right?

Looking back, I am actually quite impressed by just how polished the visuals and UI are. The game looks charming, and I can’t help but still love it. The tower icons, description windows, build menus, status icons, they all look great.

what would i do different?

The game needed a lot of testing and balancing done, and I didn’t pay it nearly as much attention as I should have. It has severely hurt what otherwise actually worked pretty decently.

I also definitely wasn’t yet terribly skilled in Godot, and it shows. A big example is me saving the player’s save data to a JSON file in the game’s source code. This shouldn’t work. I have no idea why it works.