Rapid Iteration

I was looking at the tower defense game I'd put together and I realized something interesting on what I'd inadvertently done with it. Which on a side note I would say speaks to the nature of experience and intuition. I wanted to make another TD and I figured I could probably copy and paste most of what I'd already done then ad new features and instead I found with a basic re-skin all the features I wanted were already there and just needed some slight configuring.

Late in the development I'd started on a kind of tool-tip for new players that was a bit more comprehensive than a tutorial and was ongoing rather than being a one wave use for learning. I finished that and came up with a bit of humorous revisions on it. Basically the framework I built works in the same modular way I've been working for some time and as such I can basically change anything I want without a lot of work and therefore the entire game is basically mod ready. At any point I can make a mod to alter various gameplay stats or mechanics without having to completely recompile and rebuild the entire thing. So I went from a very cyber and tech feel to a zombie and survivors TD game. The tool-tip now instead of offering helpful suggestions on which towers to upgrade or how to layout a maze etc now is setup with various dialog from the survivors to get upgrades or mentioning where to put obstacles like junk cars to build the path.

Realizing what I'd done I actually almost just turned around and put the game out on the net over the weekend, probably starting with a post on here, which I of course thought better of. Now I'm looking into how I might improve it some more balance it better and then launch it. It's mostly made using scaleform which I'm finally getting comfortable with as previously I just didn't like the feel of it and now that I'm warming up to it and understanding I see some major revisions on the other games I'm working on coming up. It was otherwise a considerably dull week which is why this post feels a little empty, suffice to say I'm redoing work on some of the games plugging in scaleform where it fits nicely and wasting the rest of my time making turret defense games.