Homebase: Defence

Motivation

After having worked on Gravideity as a "pseudo" Ludum Dare project and having a blast with it, I wanted to try participating in a real event. At the end of my first year of university, the timing finally lined up and I was able to participate in an event for real! This game was made entirely by me, from scratch, in under 72 hours.

Check it out on Ludum Dare here

Game Concept

The theme for this competition was A Small World, so I quickly came up with the idea of having to protect a delicate world. It works somewhat similarly to a tower defence game, where waves of enemies try to get to the "end" and attack your base. In Homebase, that means colliding with your planet.

Your primary form of defence is placing structures like turrets on the planet which shoot in a straight line out to space. A more expensive alternative is the homing missile, which takes much longer to arm, but will seek out targets. Players must also balance their planetary energy, which is used to power the turrets, the missile launch sites, and force fields that can be deployed.

However, the planet naturally rotates, so your defences may not be in the right orientation to defend yourself all the time. Fortunately, you have a starfighter under your direct control, which can fly around and hunt down the enemy ships.

If your pristine world gets hit by any enemies, it'll turn into a hellish landscape. Get hit twice and your once radiant homeworld will crumble to ashes, so be careful!

Infinite Waves

In order to add longevity to the game, I opted to use difficulty curves that resulted in enemy spawns, rather than hardcoding the exact wave contents.

I'm not sure how the wave difficulty scales compared with the player's defensive growth, but certainly the first 20 or so levels feel appropriately set.

Current Thoughts & Learnings

Homebase was a lot of fun to make, and having the time pressure was super helpful. Although the code ended up really messy as a consequence, the strict conditions of Ludum Dare made it easy to prioritize what features to add as well as time management in general.

I'd still like to come back and revisit this one day as I thought it was a great concept - maybe a mobile remake?