In my last blog I talked about the Sentinel series always having things that can be defended, damaged and repaired. I’ve always felt that enemies destroying the final barrier or running off the map never felt like an adequate situation for losing a game. So now each map contains your Stronghold – your main building which the enemy have to destroy for you to lose.

New Resources

The Stronghold is no ordinary building. It has its own resources which charge up over time (much like the orbital weaponry of the Sentinel) and many abilities which can be triggered as a final line of defence against the aliens.

During the game extra generators can be purchased to increase the speed at which the Stronghold charges. This gives the player a strategic choice of saving cash for turrets, or spending it on increasing the Stronghold’s power.

Abilities

This new building’s first job is to control the drones. They are now all bought with the Stronghold’s resources and use it as a home base. The Stronghold also has a range of moves which can be triggered such as a Slow Shockwave, Emergency repair, or even a targettable nuke!

These new abilities give you plenty more options whilst you’re playing. Specifically when you’ve spent all your money and it doesn’t seem quite enough to hold back the onslaught, you now have another string added to your bow. Often a well placed nuke or a couple of attack drones can save you from defeat, and earn you enough cash to upgrade your turrets.

Control

Moving the drones to the Stronghold has cleaned up the existing UI. I never thought the repair drones and drone controls fitted very nicely alongside the Sentinel’s weaponry. Adding lots of new things to trigger and new resources to manage does present some challenges though. My main focus is to make things as automatic as possible, to minimise the amount of micromanagement you have to do with the game’s systems.

I’ve never liked unnecessarily manual systems for mobile tower defence games as it’s usually too fiddly. I think things such as target selection should be clever, not manual, but this is for another blog post. In terms of the new features in Sentinel 4, I’m currently removing as much as I can from the main interface in favour of tapping on the objects themselves to bring up their related moves and controls. I’ve also got ideas for setting auto-trigger options for example to continually build attack drones with your resources which may be useful to further reduce unnecessary player intervention and free you up to concentrate on your strategy.

The enormous new campaign in Sentinel 4 is coming along nicely. We’re determined to make this the finest tower defence game it can be, and we are sure you won’t be disappointed with the result.

cheers,

Paul

Plus, if you can beat Campaign 2 level “The Pit” on Psycho, come to the forum to brag. This map’s proven the ultimate Sentinel challenge to date!

Click here for Sentinel 3: Homeworld on the App Store

Last Life is an action adventure game including puzzle and stealth elements, all mixed up with a heavy dose of mind bending time travel and time manipulation. As for why it’s called Last Life? That’s a mystery to be revealed at a later date…

The title of any video game is very important, particularly for a brand new IP. Many times it will be the player’s first hint of the type of game it is. Keeping the name memorable but also summing up the game can be quite tricky. Usually it will change many, many times from an initial working title up until the final release name.

Prime examples of this are some of our previous games. Car Mania started life as ‘Rush Hour’, and through most of development was simply known as ‘The Car Game’ (well, it does have cars in it…) AirBear grew from a simple stickman and trampoline mechanic. The main character came later, and to this day the project file is still named ‘Bounce’.

For an older example, check out this document for Nihilist, a PC game I worked on back in 1996. We had real trouble settling on a name for that one… guess we were lucky it didn’t end up being called ‘ChunderBuckets’, ‘Barf Thunder Toilet Water’ or even ‘Kill Zone’:

After saying all that, this has not been the case with Last Life. The name has stuck from the initial prototype until now, though it was originally for a completely different type of game (a story for another blog post). I can’t say for certain that the name will stay the same upon release, but it’s looking pretty likely.

Over the coming weeks I’ll fill you in on my thoughts on the trials and tribulations that go into creating a video game, as well as giving some insight into what the game is all about.

As always, feel free to comment. We love to hear from you and appreciate your input.

Jas

Head to the Tractor Trails homepage for more info, or check out the video below:

The Sentinel series has always had some key unique features to make it stand out from the crowd. One of the main ones has always been to have defensive barriers and buildings which can be damaged and destroyed. And where there is damage there is the need for repair, which has made our trusty repair drones a central part of the core gameplay.

In Sentinel 4: Dark Star we’re extending this mechanic by doing something pretty special:  Now the enemies can fight back and damage your turrets!

Some enemies can do this with a ranged attack from the path, or some flying enemies can go after them directly. To me it feels like a logical extension of the barrier system and makes everything seem much more consistent. I always thought it felt a little strange that the Behemoth from Sentinel 3 would fly over all your turrets in order to get to something it could damage. Now it can be a truly formidable opponent as it rains down the pain!

Broken Turrets

So now it’s possible for your turrets to be completely destroyed, forcing you to rebuild them. In addition, when a turret is low on health, it will break and cease to work. Repair drones now have a new and vital task: to keep your turrets healthy and working! Don’t worry, we’ve added some extra drone controls and allowed for more drones to ensure you can keep everything fixed. Having all this extra stuff to repair also opens up lots of possibilities for protection and repair abilities. We’ve got some commander abilities, orbital weapons and even turrets that can help with protecting and repairing your defensive turrets in times of need.

Level up!

Even though the player is inherently rewarded by preventing their turrets being destroyed, I felt like there should be a better, more positive reward for players investing heavily in repairing and keeping their defences alive. So now as the turrets shoot and destroy enemies, they gain points (Experience Points if you want to call them that) and will automatically ‘Level Up’ and gain a boost to their damage and potentially their other stats. This allows the player to really feel as though a turret is something to be protected and nurtured, and turrets which are put into the fray and looked after will become a true asset to the player’s defences!

These new systems really open up the gameplay and make it feel fresh and different. I hope you enjoyed reading and I’ll try and find some time to write about more of the new Sentinel 4: Dark Star features soon!

cheers,

Paul

Here’s the first of many dev blog posts during development of Sentinel 4: Dark Star to hopefully give you an insight into what goes into the production. We’ll give some references back to the previous titles in the Sentinel series to show the ongoing progression.

At the heart of every tower defence game is the map. It’s the root of the strategy for the game, defining where you can build towers and influencing the effectiveness of weaponry and enemy behaviour. Throughout the Sentinel series of games we’ve evolved the map making process to streamline it to allow us to make maps more easily, and add more gameplay features.

We started off designing them by hand on paper and hardcoding them into the game manually – proper ‘old skool’. Here’s one of my original Sentinel 1 map designs:

Once the map was tested and finalised, we’d build and render the landscape to match the design as a single image. Although this worked, it resulted in a lot of large unique textures and meant we were only able to have a small number of maps for Sentinel 1 and Sentinel 2.

For Sentinel 3 we switched the map technology to be completely tile based, allowing us to reuse textures and design many maps using tile sets.

Using the excellent Tiled level editor, we designed the maps, setup the majority of the level data and integrated it all into our engine.

The map is built up from many layers from the tile sets, then pre-rendered to a texture during the level load to reduce the memory footprint and keep the framerate up whilst the game is being played.

Here’s a finished Sentinel 3 map in the editor: