Think you can build a better Tower Defense game for Windows Phone 7? Start here... ScriptTD

Coding4Fun - ScriptTD: Tower Defense Made Easy

"ScriptTD is an open source project that allows anyone to easily create a new Tower Defense game for the Windows Phone 7 platform, without any prior programming knowledge. The project lets you create new art & audio and edit some XML files to bring it all together into a polished game without having to write all of the code required to make the game work.

If you are looking to just create a game without coding, this article isn’t for you, head to http://scripttd.codeplex.com and follow the instructions there to get started.

Extending the Code

You can easily get away with editing the XML and adding new assets to make a whole new Tower Defense game with ScriptTD as it is. If you know a bit of C#, however, you can take it further and extend the game to make a unique creation. The entire source code for the project is available for free on Codeplex (see links above), so feel free to download that and change any part of it that you want.

There are three key areas that are easy to change in ScriptTD:

• Weapons
• The GUI
• The Game Screens (Menus)

In this article we are going to focus on the main one you might want to edit the weapons.

...

Conclusion

You now know how to add a completely new weapon type to the game, which will let you add a unique touch to your Tower Defense game. There are other areas in the game that you can extend in code, and there is a lot of power in the XML definition files. So if you are interested in learning more, browse the code and the documentation at the Codeplex link at the start of the article. Play around with the behavior, create a new tower in XML, and tweak the values. If you find the sound annoying you can add a delay in between changing targets, or completely remove the sound from the XML. Make whatever you want using the tools available—turn it into something you made. Remember, the tools are free and with some creativity you can make a really great game

..."

CodePlex - Coding4Fun's ScriptTD - Documentation - Updating the Script XML

"I’m a big fan of Tower Defense games and I’ve always wanted to build my own. The problem is I’m better at graphics than programming. Script TD was born as a way to abstract the programming and create a Tower Defense engine that allows anyone to create a TD game with some simple scripting.

The Script TD project contains a Visual Studio project and a number of directories containing the engine, the XML that constructs the game, and the graphics. After extracting the project you can follow along with me as I walk you through each of the files and directories and explain how they work.

By changing the graphics and the attributes/behaviors of the maps, towers, and creeps, you too can make your own Tower Defense game and even sell it in the Windows Phone Marketplace. If you’re also a developer you can extend Script TD to include new features and additions.

So let’s get started.

..."

Names and assumptions are a funny thing.

I'd seen "ScriptTD" in my news stream, saw it was mentioned on a Channel 9 show (Ping 110- ScriptTD, Photosynth for dollars, Microsoft Garage, Kinect Light Saber) but "assumed" it was something "script'ie." You know, something like a Script Touch Down, JavaScript, or something kind of thing. And right now I'm not all the keyed for scripting stuff (except for PowerShell, but that's a different story). In short, I didn't follow up on it.

Then came this Coding4Fun article by Clint Rutkas and Michael Quandt and after reading the first sentence I realized that my assumption was really a mental ID-10-T error (i.e. I was an idiot)... sigh

Anyway...

If you've always wanted to build a game, dig the tower defense category, would dig seeing it on a Windows Phone 7, but never knew where to start, this is the project for you!