Tower Defense Gaming and Computational Intelligence Part 2 | TD Gaming

One great example of the tower defense game is Flash Element TD.

This TD game was inspired by a War Craft 3 subgame called Element TD. In this game, there are three different tower types. One has low firepower but can target air and land enemies. And the other two can only target either land or air. With the acquisition of gold from killing enemies, you can upgrade your towers to more expensive but much stronger towers. You can also buy expensive towers outright.

In Element TD, the enemies follow a path from the start and position. For each enemy that reaches the end position without being destroyed, life is lost and that enemy reenters the map back at the point where it originated. The level only finishes when the enemies are destroyed. There are total 31 levels that slowly but surely require more strategic sophistication order to win each level.

Because of the ease of play, and the gradual nature of the increased difficulty of the game, this can become very popular with so-called casual gamers. These are people that respond to instant progression, and has very little time for each play session.

These types of small short session games gain popularity in the 1990s with the invention of flash-based web games. The ability to play them in a browser, made them extremely accessible to anyone with a few moments of time to play while they are working on a desktop.

TD Game Elements

One of the other great ideas behind tower defense games is the fact of the boundaries are always being pushed and that they are malleable and don’t strictly define the genre. They are common themes, and common mechanics, but there is no hard-core set of rules that govern all tower defense games. Some elements, however, are usually present in each TD game.

The first one of these common elements is of course the terrain. This is just the general level in which you play. The map also forms the limitations on how the user can place towers and upgrade towers. Traditionally, the map is a linear path with areas surrounding the path that are buildable. More challenging levels have equally corresponding more challenging pathways. Some maps only allow certain towers to be built on certain tiles, or areas of the map. Some maps also begin with towers already been placed on the terrain. Restricting the players ability to play certain towers in certain places and not be able to change towers that are already created help improve strategic difficulty and challenge.

Not all terrain maps in tower defense games have linear path. There also games that have branching paths, or paths that can change during the course of the level. Sometimes TD enemies will choose random paths, making it more unpredictable where they will end up during the course of the level.

keep reading on Tower Defense Gaming and Computational Intelligence Part 3