Target priority settings?
Posted: Wed Feb 10, 2016 6:58 pm
Have you thought about the idea of target priority settings? Some tower defense games have them, allowing the player to decide what enemy gets attacked when. It's useful for making sure that the heroes / towers get the most value out of their theoretical DPS and don't ineffectually waste their attacks. I feel that for the most part, the attack priorities hardcoded into the heroes are pretty good - Jack shoots the enemy closest to the goal, since he just hits a single one anyway, Barrows tries to spread his slow effect to as many enemies as possible, Sam tries to target clumps, and Wylde (who was called Wesley in his unlock panel for some strange reason I don't understand) seems to actually try to line up his piercing shots to hit multiple enemies. Not sure what Jane does, but her targeting must make some kind of sense, too.
Still, there are some situations where you might want to alter this behavior. Like, if there's a huge wave of regenerating zombies bearing down on you, and you don't really have the firepower to break through their healing if the heroes just spread their shots around like they do. Or maybe you'd want Barrows to only slow the front ranks, because this would actually make enemies clump up more for Sam's pumpkins. Yeah, you can click specific enemies to target them, but then the front guy will be out of range or dead a half-second later and you have to click another one, and while you are doing this you have no time to worry about things like upgrading heroes or looking for better spots to reposition them, and the game doesn't pause for you.
This is another case where being able to halt the game while you give orders would be handy. If in a crunch you could go as slow as you need and take the game a few split seconds at a time, that would be enough to make the simple single monster targeting option the game gives you work. Surely you must have considered and already rejected the idea of adding the ability to pause time to the game. What were your reasons?
Anyway, targeting priorities. Ideally, you should be able to set behavior for each character separately. Target first, target last, target low HP monsters, target high HP monsters. From there you could branch out to more esoteric edge cases or priorities that override other priorities. For a game that does this really well, check out Defenders Quest by Level Up Labs, another tower defense game that uses heroes as towers (though they can't actually move).
Still, there are some situations where you might want to alter this behavior. Like, if there's a huge wave of regenerating zombies bearing down on you, and you don't really have the firepower to break through their healing if the heroes just spread their shots around like they do. Or maybe you'd want Barrows to only slow the front ranks, because this would actually make enemies clump up more for Sam's pumpkins. Yeah, you can click specific enemies to target them, but then the front guy will be out of range or dead a half-second later and you have to click another one, and while you are doing this you have no time to worry about things like upgrading heroes or looking for better spots to reposition them, and the game doesn't pause for you.
This is another case where being able to halt the game while you give orders would be handy. If in a crunch you could go as slow as you need and take the game a few split seconds at a time, that would be enough to make the simple single monster targeting option the game gives you work. Surely you must have considered and already rejected the idea of adding the ability to pause time to the game. What were your reasons?
Anyway, targeting priorities. Ideally, you should be able to set behavior for each character separately. Target first, target last, target low HP monsters, target high HP monsters. From there you could branch out to more esoteric edge cases or priorities that override other priorities. For a game that does this really well, check out Defenders Quest by Level Up Labs, another tower defense game that uses heroes as towers (though they can't actually move).