What are your favorite features of tower defense games?

28 minutes ago, Ray Long said:

What are your favorite features of tower defense games?

Towers

You're going to have to ask a slightly more specific question.

Mostly I like effect towers that don't just do damage. Slow towers, stun towers, poison/burn towers, confuse towers etc.

I got hooked on TD's with Xeno Tactic.  The part that I enjoyed was that as you figured out new strategies to TD's you could advance further.  The bottle neck to progress was how you played your game.  I thought it was well balanced despite the fact that level 6 is unbeatable in the original edition.  I think I made it to wave 91 or something.

Another feature I like is the upgrading.  I like it when you really have to pinch your resources and scrap by success and then in the end achieve a maxed out tower ( which is haaard to get ) and that tower just dominates the playing field.  All that hard work paid off nicely.

I believe in Tower Defense games, the use of infinite resources are my favourite quality. Being able to continuously run the game for as long as you can last with no shortage of challenge/enemies or the virtual currency that comes with it. However there is a cap to the 'builds' you can acquire, but being able to throw in all of them in one run is more or less 'impossible' (don't quote me on that XD)

My absolute favourite feature of a tower defense game is from Kingdom Rush. There is this one tower that has the special ability to transform enemies into sheep every few seconds.

On 2/27/2018 at 10:48 PM, Ray Long said:

What are your favorite features of tower defense games?

Upgrades and progress. Games like Bloons TD are fun, because you can upgrade one tower ridiculously many times. Dart monkey can throw spike balls, triple darts, fast darts or many other stuff. It is always good in TD games to give player lots of ways to beat the stage, not to just put one OP tower. Let the player explore your game. 

You can also check android TD game called Infinitode. The took this concept into immerse game where you always progress and the game evolves with time.

For me, a tower defense game can really stand out in three ways:

1. Interesting tower design. Although this one should be obvious, there are too many TD games that follow a generic tower design. The reason Bloons TD is so successful is that it has a good variety of towers and features. It's fun to test out new tower combinations and, most importantly, the towers feel satisfying.

2. Tower evolutionary paths. You feel invested into your towers when you get to evolve them, seeing their characteristics change as you make choices on how they progress. To be honest, for me I think TD's are very limited in their evolutionary paths, even Bloons TD falls rather flat. Tower evolutions should give two things: more power, and more fun. However it's rare to see a TD to take risks in this area, since you can't go wrong with traditional-based tower evolutions. I get that, but I'd still love to see someone go wild one day with the evolutionary paths.

3. Progress. A good TD will be taking you somewhere, not just having you build towers. Whether this is done through a campaign-based narrative, unlocking further events (maps) and combat variety (features/towers/evolutions) or providing competition with players through co-op, versus or leaderboards. Or a combination of all three, which is, again, what Bloons TD does (minus the narrative). Progress makes you feel involved, and it makes you want to continue to play even after the game becomes stale and predictable.

And that's the thing. A tower defense game is never infinite. The player will, at some point, put it down and stop playing. A good tower defense game doesn't try to prolong this. They try to make that period of time before the player stops as fun and interesting as possible. try Kingdom Rush on the app store, which focuses on a campaign-based narrative for progress. That's a good example of a TD that provides a large satisfaction in its gameplay, but isn't an extensive and time-consuming TD. People love it because it gives a great experience, even though it's considered a far shorter game compared to bloons TD (but that concept is very artificial since bloons TD focuses on competition and event/combat variety).