Pac Defence

[Slogsweep]

I think this is the right place to post. It's been my pet project over the Summer, it's about as finished as it'll ever be, but I'm still making minor changes.

You can find it at www.freewebs.com/pacdefence

Enjoy

And if you can't get it to work, found a bug, or just have comments make a post here and I'll try to help/fix it/read

[The Noid]

Nice, another Java programmer. And another open-source TD
Welcome

[Tubias]

You should add a place to show how much a tower costs, unless i didn't see it. Also, none of my towers were able to even hit them because they went too fast.

[Slogsweep]

The price of whatever you were going to do should be in green just above the Start button.

And if your towers are missing, you might think of some upgrades in bullet speed, or get towers such as Beam or Laser where it doesn't matter so much

[cookie3]

I really appreciate the wide variety of towers available. A lot of the tower ideas are staples in TD games, but it's nice to so many of them available in a single game.

I also like the ability to place the circle-shaped towers in whatever pattern I desire, so as to maximize the usage of space. Unfortunately, it's hard to see where valid and invalid placements are located, so it takes sometimes quite a few clicks before I'm able to position the tower "just right" to get it placed. I would suggest adding some visual feedback so it's easier to place towers (such as changing the tower green (for a valid placement) or red (invalid)).

While the tower names are (generally) descriptive, a help menu listing tower powers (i.e. "Wave tower shoots in a wave. Special Upgrade: Increases the arc of the wave" maybe with a picture of it firing, too) would be nice.

When pacmen are poisoned, slowed, or frozen, it would be nice if they changed color to indicate their status.

The mechanics seem really solid, though.

[bobthecow]

Game gets too hard too quickly.

I made it to level 17. Can anyone beat that?

[cookie3]

On easy, I beat level 25 without losing any lives before I got tired of the lag (each level would take ~15 minutes to beat).. the creeps were dying about 3/4ths of the way along the path, so I probably could've gone 1-2 more waves without losing anything, and maybe 3-4 more before losing.

The "solution" was freeze towers + a few big AE towers (wave+omnidirectional for me). I had 1 Aid Tower in the middle, whose range I extended far enough to cover the entire map. Bonuses generally went into special, rate or damage boosts, depending on what my tower composition was. By the end, I had probably 20ish freeze towers, too. I suspect using slow towers would've also helped. I also had a weaken tower there, but TBH I'm not entirely sure what benefit it had, since I added it very late.

Basically, because enemy HP/spawn times/numbers grow exponentially, you need fast-shooting, high-damaging, wide-ranging AE damage. If you can't hit 70-80 (out of 100+) at a time, you're going to lose.

[Slogsweep]

cookie3: I've been planning on writing a manual to help out, I just haven't got around to it yet and yeah, I've also been planning on giving some feedback when you can't build a tower, just haven't figured out the right way to do it yet.

bobthecow: My best is 22 on hard, but I reckon I could've got a few more levels in playing better

cookie3 x2: Yeah, I know about the lag, it is mainly the beam and wave towers that cause it, though I thought of a way that might fix it (or at least improve things a lot) at work today so when I get that implemented I hope it helps.
What weaken towers do is temporarily make the creeps (I called the sprites when I started) take double damage, so they're necessary if you want to get a top score.

edit: I just uploaded a new version which 1: Gives you feedback about whether or not you can build a tower and 2: Implemented my idea which makes Wave and Beam Towers *much* faster. I had almost no lag at level 27 with Wave and similarly at level 31 with Beam.

[cookie3]

Yes, the lag is gone. It's a MUCH smoother experience now, which I'm glad to see.

[bobthecow]

Huh. I never had lag anyways. The multishot tower (the one that shoots multiple bullets at a time) is epicly placed at the end of a line

Ex.

=======O

= is path, O is the tower.

keep upgrading speed and shot number, plus damage a range, and you have a machine gun that spits out hundreds to thousands of bullets a second. Epic win. You have to put it at the end of a long straight path though. That way it doesn't have to aim XD.

I can start the game out that way and be fine for a long time until their hp goes off the charts.