The Revisionist: Tower defense with a side of real time strategy.

Working with a small group on an Android title we're calling The Revisionist for the time being. It's primarily tower defense, with the player either on offense--deploying troops to take down the opponent's stronghold--or defense--setting up turrets and obstacles to stave off the opponent's oncoming waves.

We're still planning and designing as we go along, and a lot of things are still changing, but I figure I can drop a few concepts of what we have so far.

Overview

The player's main object is to take over enemy territory while defending their own. Territory is designed in the form of Nodes on an overall map. I drew up a rough diagram of the World Map to give an idea of the Node system:

They're basically locations that you'll be trying to conquer through the course of the game. There are different types of Nodes--some will be used to harvest and yield resources like metal or currency, others will be used to house your army, and still others will be strongholds that you'll have to defend from enemy invasions. There's a bit of real time strategy in this aspect of the game where you'll manage your Resource Nodes to gather the things you'll need to succeed in battle. The stronghold Nodes are where most of the action happens, so to speak. When the enemy tries to attack one of your stronghold Nodes, the game will segue into the Tower Defense phase, at which point you'll engage in battle:

You basically have a top down battlefield where the main gameplay happens. The fort in the upper right is the stronghold that the Defense team is trying to guard, using turrets (shown above) and other obstacles. Before battle, the Defense team will be allowed to place a limited number of structures on the field, which is broken up into individual tiles. I designed the tiles as well as the environment objects for the battlefield mockups we've been making to plan things so far:

I designed some prototype soldiers to walk along the field, including some basic actions we want to use like marching, attacking, and being KO'd. We're thinking of using a pixel art style for the characters in the game and sticking with the hand drawn look for objects/environments.

Offense

We're still working on how the player will issue commands to units when on the Offense. We have a few different methods at the moment, but we're still working through which will be most comfortable for the player in the heat of a battle.

One of our first ideas shown above, another team member came up with this one. As mentioned earlier we're planning to build for Android devices, so you'd simply tap on the unit onscreen, and a cloud of command options would appear--Attack nearby obstacles, March forward along the path, act as a Martyr for nearby allies, and so forth. Then tap on whichever command you wish to carry out.

This is more of a dashboard setup that I had an idea for. The icons on the right would correspond to Units on the field, and on the bottom you choose your command. On one hand it removes clutter from the battlefield itself, but on the other a dashboard like this would use up a lot of room on the Android's screen, which might make the field difficult to see clearly. We may use a fusion of the two styles somehow for the best result.

We don't have much to show for the Defense side of play quite yet, but hopefully I'll have visuals for that part of the game soon as well.