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Desktop Tower Defense Tips and Flash Gaming Thoughts

Posted Wed, June 27, 2007, 7:31pm EST

Despite having plenty of more productive things to do with my time, I've been hooked on this game Desktop Tower Defense for almost two months, now. And while I don't consider myself to be in the upper-echelon of players — I'm not ready to go Pro — I have become quite good. Maybe 95th+ percentile. Good enough to teach. So here's some teaching, a few Desktop Tower Defense pointers that might help you — lowly DTD-plebe that you are — improve your game a bit.

1. Get your creeps on the same path ASAP, but make sure the distances they must travel to get onto that shared path are different enough in length so that the creeps are spread out as they run past your towers. When they get all clumped up together, your towers will have less of a chance to hit them.

2. Define the paths the creeps will take with cheap Pellet Towers. But place Squirt Towers where they have access to the longest lengths of path and can shoot at the flying creeps. And then get those Squirt Towers up to level 5 as quickly as possible. Level 5 Squirt Towers are crazy powerful. Get a couple of them going early in the game and you're on easy street. But remember, a smaller number of more powerful Squirt Towers is preferable to a large number of weak ones.

3. Don't worry about the absolute length of the path the creeps will take. Don't fill up the screen. Make your goal getting as many level 5 Squirt Towers as possible.

4. Once you've got a stable base of Squirt Towers, put a couple freeze towers where they can hit creeps and flying creeps. And level them up a couple rounds. These will help, especially against the flying boss creeps.

5. The Swarm Towers are great for killing flying creeps, but don't level them up too high too early. You'll just take points away from leveling up your Squirt Towers. Squirts will kill flying creeps fast, too, so get those going at the beginning. Only concentrate on getting level 5 Swarm Towers when the flying boss creeps approach — but don't ruin your game trying to kill those guys. They can be tough to kill, especially in Challenge Mode, but you'll only loose two lives if you miss 'em.

So, there you go.

Novel Concepts, the blog by the guy responsible for Desktop Tower Defense (and another guy), is an interesting read, as well. Their Flash piracy post is an interesting perspective on the "meme piracy" which is rampant online. (Any popular meme image or video — anything small and probably created by someone indie enough not be able to control it with lawyers — will eventually wind up on meme-dump sites like ebaumsworld — which I won't link to because, frankly, I think many sites like this are essentially scummy and spammy and shitty. (Something Awful agrees.) Ebaumsworld is a particularly egregious case. But these sites appear to be actually quite difficult to get rid of because, of course, few people have the resources to go after them over some image or video or small Flash game that goes viral and gets popular.

But there's another interesting point in all of this. Desktop Tower Defense is great — horribly, horribly addictive. But it is definitely not horribly, horribly original. It builds upon the fine tradition of tower defense games that started with a Warcraft III mod (I'm told — I've never played WCIII). It's almost indefinable why this version so compelling. I've played a few others and felt just "blah" and not interested. Partly, I think, it's the fact that it is a phenomenon — I can talk about this game with people is a way I could never really talk about some little Flash game I'd come upon in the past. (I mean, talking about it kind of feels like comparing masturbation tips, but still — at least we're all masturbating.) Even console games rarely have this appeal because it's rare for me to play a game at the same time as someone else — when I talk about the new Wii Zelda, I'm either talking to people who've finished it or who haven't started.

Kongregate, the new social gaming site that now has their ads all over Desktop Tower Defense (which I'm actually okay with) appears to want to capitalize on the above feelings — community around small, quickie games. Will it work? They have almost 1,000 games available right now, including Desktop Tower Defense. I'd ballpark about one out of every 1000 Flash games are compelling enough to play more than once. Game design can be hard, let's be honest, and small Flash games necessarily follow that difficult-to-predict "pop song" model — so many bands are capable of tossing together a quick, catchy, fun track that the market gets glutted and the winners, the band that gets the hit, can be difficult to anticipate (unless there's a giant marketing push of some sort). (I also don't buy the "revenue sharing" business model, but that's another post.) So Kongregate will have to get much larger soon to become viable as a business, I think — or else learn to capitalize extremely well on hits like Desktop Tower Defense. I've never seen a Flash game go viral quite as hard as Desktop Tower Defense has, though, so... We'll see what happens.