Playing as a builder is what will set my game apart from other MOBA games. Initially, the plan was for the builder to manage the processes that usually happen automatically in this genre. This means that minions and towers would fall under their control.
As with other heroes, selecting the builder was done through skill acquisition. However, unlike the others, the builder had no additional learnable abilities; instead, progress was made by investing various resources. All resources had to be gathered in the forest. For simplicity, I decided to eliminate resources that required crafting. Thus, only directly obtainable resources were used – such as sticks, logs, bamboo, palm leaves, stone, copper, iron, and obsidian. Gold was also a resource, but it wasn't gathered in the forest; instead, it was earned by killing enemy minions and heroes. Like other heroes, the builder had access to a shop where he could buy artifacts. His appearance was customized through invisible clothing slots, which, in addition to their aesthetic function, provided the builder with an extra 16 inventory slots.
Since the builder needs to move around the map a lot, his running speed was significantly higher than that of combat heroes. However, in direct combat, he doesn't pose a serious threat.
Towers
To influence the towers, I decided to limit the builder’s ability to upgrade the existing towers placed along the road from the start of the game. Eventually, I planned to add the ability to construct new towers and enable towers to use their own spells. However, at the outset, the starting tower could only be upgraded to one of three second-level tower variants: Lightning Tower, Machine Gun Tower, and Plasma Tower.
All three advanced towers have increased attack range, more health, and deal more damage compared to the original tower. Textures from Force of Nature were used for the appearance of these towers, but new models were created. The models were kept relatively simple and temporary since game elements were frequently added and removed. The Machine Gun Tower has a high rate of fire but low damage. Its attacks deal purely physical damage. The Lightning Tower fires more slowly but with greater power, dealing damage that is half physical and half magical. Additionally, the Lightning Tower has slightly more health than the other two. The Plasma Tower deals magical damage. It has the slowest attack speed, but its damage is the highest. I wouldn't say the towers are radically different from each other, but this was the initial setup. To upgrade the starting tower to an enhanced version, the builder needed to approach the tower with all the required resources and rebuild it. During this process, the tower would remain inactive for a few seconds.
Minions
From the start of the game, portals on both sides generate a wave of 5 goblins every 30 seconds. First come 2 defender goblins, then one melee goblin, and finally 2 archers. At any time, the builder can open a special minion management window and set a new wave configuration.
The builder can use gathered resources to construct dens for new minions, allowing players to hire mercenaries from other races using gold. Dens were made available for spiders, orcs, skeletons, and lizards. Despite goblins being available from the start of the game, players also had the option to construct a goblin den. In these dens, players could research upgrades for minions that increased various characteristics specific to each race. Like the towers, the models for these dens were assembled using existing textures. Here they are, in the following order: Goblin Den, Orc Den, Spider Den, Skeleton Den, Lizard Den:
Like goblins, each of the other races also had a defender minion, melee minion, and ranged minion. All units were taken from Force of Nature. Initially, defenders and melee units did not differ significantly from each other – they were both melee units with slightly different parameters. Some had higher attack speed, others more damage, some more health, and others armor. Different races also had different types of damage (physical, magical, poison) and varying defenses against these attacks (normal armor, magic resistance, poison resistance). There were more significant differences among ranged units. For lizards, their ranged unit was the kappa, which spewed a poisonous cloud that dealt area damage and poisoned enemies for a period of time. For skeletons, their ranged unit was the skeleton bomber, which also dealt area damage with bombs. Spiders had a ranged attack from the spider with webbing, whose attacks created webs that slowed down the attack and movement speed of enemies. Essentially, these features were directly adapted from Force of Nature since they were already developed.
In addition to constructing dens and upgrading minions, there was another way the builder could influence mobs. It was decided that the builder could "possess" any mob at any time and control it directly. This required some adjustments to the network code, as in Force of Nature each client connected to the server calculates their own hero and controls it. Calculating the physics of movement, hero actions, spell cooldowns, health, and the effects of various auras and spells – all of these computations are handled on the client's computer. I've already mentioned this in this post. However, the server (host player who started the game and invited friends) handles the calculation of all monsters. To allow builder-clients to control minions, a Star-based interaction system had to be implemented (this system was mentioned here).
Once everything was ready, we began testing the game from the builder's perspective. From that point on, we started recording all our matches to be able to analyze them later and identify any gameplay issues. So, from now on, I'll be documenting my posts with full gameplay videos.
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