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Auto Tower Defense is a tower defense auto battler with a patent-royalty system baked in. This puts a few twists on the traditional tower defense format.
Instead of fighting off continuous waves of AI enemies, you battle waves of other async players on a chess-like board. Your top battles are also saved permanently at the end of your run, and at the level you lost at, allowing other players to face you as part of their continuous wave of player-enemy encounters.
You can also earn royalties (in electricity), which can later be sold for USDC. These royalty fees are divvied out when someone wins a battle using a tower component that you engineered and patented. Many patents may never get used, but if you strike on something incredibly useful, you'll find yourself earning a fair amount of electricity asynchronously.
With these two twists, the hope is to showcase mechanics that RaidGuild Forge plans to use in all its upcoming mini-games.
RaidGuild Forge is a web3 gaming venture from RaidGuild DAO. You can read much more about it here, but suffice it to say that we'll be running mini-game experiments--like Auto Tower Defense--from now through the end of the year.
The goal is to apply our 3 Personas mechanic to different genres until we strike on something that works really well.
As RaidGuild Forge's first mini-game, Auto Tower Defense will apply the 3 Personas mechanic with the following persona instantiations.
Component Engineer: the player who uses the game's Digital Physics constraints to engineer tower components (components could include projectile launchers, wheels, and shields)
Tower Assembler: the player who assembles pre-engineered components into a full tower (towers can be offensive, defensive, or a hybrid)
Battler: the player who uses pre-assembled towers to battle
A single player can of course be all 3 personas, or just 1, if they so choose.
Part of the 3 Personas mechanic is also how it relates to patent-royalty stacking.
Engineers and Assemblers have the opportunity to patent their work for others to use, and when a Battler earns stake from their win, a portion of that stake gets distributed to the patentees of all towers and components that the battler used. As the game grows, the list of components and towers grows; as that list grows, the battle meta changes; and as the meta changes, demand for which components and towers are needed changes. The goal is for this dynamic to always be in flux.
⚠️ Note, however, that during the initial alpha playtests, the Tower Assembler persona will not be available.
A mechanic that may end up being unique to the Auto Tower Defense mini-game is the idea of async battles. As mentioned above, a player's best battle in a run is saved at that level in order for other players to face in their own continuous wave of async player-enemy encounters. The way this works is relatively straightforward:
Every turn is broken into discrete actions
Actions are saved into a replay-able “Saved Battle”
Once you lose your run, the Saved Battle with the highest level in that run is saved permanently at that level
When another player reaches that level, there is a random chance of running into your Saved Battle
If this happens, the saved actions are replayed against that player
As your Saved Game wins battles, it accumulates and divvies electricity:
Half goes to you and the patentees of your towers/components
The other half stays with your Saved Game and becomes a reward for the next player who defeats it
The idea is to let the game evolve continuously—as more players join, the catalog of enemy encounters grows organically. There is also the appeal of creating an amazing Saved Battle that earns you electricity while you sleep.
This is a very early alpha playtest, primarily to test out the patent-royalty economy. There are currently only 2 tower types, and 1 component type, but more will be added throughout the playtest. We also only included 2 personas for now: Component Engineer and Battler. The Tower Assembler persona is being worked on, though, and should be included in later rounds of the alpha playtest.
There will be 5 rounds, starting on June 30th and going until August 30th:
Round 1: starts June 30th
Round 2: starts July 14th
Round 3: starts July 28th
Round 4: starts August 11th
Round 5: starts August 25th
Every round will last 1 week, leaving the week after dedicated to bug fixes and new features. Each round will also be loaded up with around 100 USDC in winnings in order to incentivize people to play what is frankly a fairly incomplete game right now. As time goes on, people may decide to purchase electricity from the Solar Farm, which will introduce more money into the economy. Finally, these playtest rounds will start with only 100 open player slots, so if you want to play, create an account early!
You can enter the playtest now at autotowerdefense.com.
For support, questions, or ideas, reach out to RaidGuild Forge via the RaidGuild DAO Discord: https://discord.gg/AWHGb8Fs
This blog is also dedicated to sharing upcoming games by RaidGuild Forge, and feature updates for Auto Tower Defense, so subscribe if you want to stay up-to-date. ⚔
ECWireless
¿Is Highest Level on the leaderboard the highest level completed or the highest level competed in? It seems to be the former & I think it should be the later.
Actually, it was just waiting on me to hit End Turn, even though it wasn't my turn. On to Level 8.
You should add a time limit on turns. I've been on Round 7 of Level 7 for about four hours now waiting on ECWirelessisgay to take their turn.
The Help section says you get one action per turn. Also, the End Turn button shouldn't really be available when it's not my turn.
It seems like you could optimistically update the state when a player moves & then leave all the delays to the round ending. The lag is hard to deal with while moving, but less so when waiting for a new round.
I don't seem to be getting anything when I win. Maybe because almost all my battles have been against opponents who staked 0Wh.
If I make multiple moves quickly while one is processing, the in progress indicator ends with the completion of the first task & the second will just spontaneously happen sometime later.
A feature that would be really nice would be the ability to replay the shots taken. A couple times I've looked away or they didn't display at all, & I can't tell why my shots aren't hitting.
So far, I definitely like the principle, though the restrictions on distance are a little fuzzy.