Building your game dev skills building Tower Defense games (and a hint about updates to ScriptTD)

Dave Bost - Jump into Game Development with the Tower Defense Genre

"A common dream of most developers is to develop a game. Game development can be very intimidating to jump into straight away. The hardest decision is to determine what kind of game you’re going to create – what’s the backstory, who are the actors, what’s their purpose, what does success look like, and so on. Once you determine what game you’re going to make, you next need to determine how you’re going to go about making that game. There are certainly a wide array of technologies and game engines that are well suited for certain kinds of games. The decision can be limited based on where you’d like to play that game. In other words, which platform will your game target? Certainly over the past few years, the accelerated adoption of smart phones and tablet devices have really given rise to the casual game genre. One of the more popular casual game types and one not to intimidating for new game developers to jump into is the Tower Defense game genre.

What is a Tower Defense game?

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Building Your Own Tower Defense Game

You can go the route of Pirates Versus Daisies and build your game from scratch using HTML5/JS. Fortunately, their hard work is to our benefit as we now have JavaScript libraries such as EaselJS, TweenJS, SoundJS, and PreloadJS to help in our efforts. There are additional JavaScript libraries available for the budding game developer such as CraftyJS and ImpactJS as well.

Our friends over at Coding4Fun produced an Open Source Tower Defense Engine called ScriptTD. With ScriptTD, you don’t need to have any development skills to build a great Tower Defense game. You just need to know how edit a text file. Well an XML file to be exact, but you can be up and running with your Tower Defense game in no time. For you seasoned developers, the code for ScriptTD is available up on CodePlex which gives you the ability to see how the Tower Defense engine hums.

Currently ScriptTD is available for developing Windows Phone games. However, I’ve been told that work is being done to add the ability to create Windows 8 games as well. Stay tuned

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ScriptTD for Win8? Awesome... :)

 

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