Mountain Pass Tower Defense Developer Updates
This page is updated whenever I make updates to the game that changes the game play, difficulty, or adds features.
12/6/2008
*
Casual Review covered Mountain Pass Tower Defense
in their "Flash Friday: Turret Defense" round-up. Of course, the game is
written in Silverlight, but we can all get along.
*
Doug Swisher mentioned the game on his blog in
discussing various tower defense games he likes; he is also considering creating
a Silverlight TD game of his own.
* Updates planned: I now have a Vista laptop and access to Microsoft's new,
swanky Azure services, which are cloud services where Microsoft lets developers
like me store data, access it, and do other cool things using their
infrastructure. I am going to try to implement a global and perhaps
friends high score system with it so that you can see how you are faring
compared with "the world".
11/15/2008
*
Casual Gamer Chick reviewed Mountain Pass Tower Defense
favorably, and it was voted 5 stars by the community.
* I've continued to gather feedback on the game and am working on including more
social aspects to it including a high score board where you and your friends can
compete; I like this high score better than the way Desktop Tower Defense does
it where it just says "You scored X points which ranks 1,340,821 on the high
score chart"--I know that you can enter a group name but my friends don't play
in a group or collaborate like that.
* I'm also considering ways of your friends getting to control the enemy waves
and enemy types that attack you in the game.
10/15/2008
* Created gameplay video and added to the
How to play the game page.
10/14/2008
* Rebuilt the game against the released version of Silverlight 2.0.
* Added tooltips over the tower buttons so you can see a brief description of
each tower's ability.
10/11/2008
* Fixed bug where the sounds from the towers firing overloaded the sound
capabilities on the computer, resulting in sounds not being played and getting
quiet, unless you paused then they kind of "caught up" and all made a bunch of
noise. Now if lots of towers are on the screen firing a ton of bullets, it
moderates how many actual sounds it tries to cram through the system.
* Nerfed the poison tower somewhat--from play testers feedback this tower seemed
to be too powerful, especially at its highest levels; it now shoots somewhat
slower and the poison duration for the highest upgraded level (Venom Spewer)
lasts 16 seconds instead of 20.
* Silverlight Release Candidate 0 (RC0) has been out for a week or two now--Silverlight
will release by mid-November it looks like! I will rebuild the game with
the released version when it finally does release to the web (RTW) and Beta
versions like everyone has installed now get automatically updated by Microsoft
(is there anything they can't do?).
10/4/2008
* Finished secret tower implementation: You can now unlock it if you are clever
--> Hint: Death Blossoms and the Stun Tower are key to
unlocking it
* Only one secret tower can be unlocked per game play, so depending on which
triggers you hit first, you get a different secret tower
10/1/2008
* Discovered fix for bug that could happen on game over screen--not sure if you
ever hit it because it only showed up in debug mode
* About half-way through implementation of another secret tower, which will have
its own unique triggers for unlocking it
9/27/2008
* Fixed bug where enemy would get stuck and never move again because it was both
stunned but also being wailed on by a secret tower
* Rebalanced game, reducing the costs of the cannon tower, poison tower, bomb
tower, and stun tower
* Added difficulty for medium and hard difficulty levels: some enemies within
one wave come very close together every so often, making it harder to pick them
all off, poison them, etc., though it does give the bomb towers easy pickings...
* Updated
how to play the game page with much more
detailed information about what each tower does and looks like, what the enemies
look like and what resistances they have to which kinds of towers.
9/25/2008
* Made easy level even easier and ratcheted down the number of waves from 50 to
30 (on easy level)
9/24/2008
* The game now saves your high scores!
* Your high score for each of the three difficulty levels is
saved, so now you know when you beat your high score
* This information is saved in "isolated storage", a small
sandbox on your file system made available to web browsers which cannot access
your main file system (for good reason!)
* Made easy level easier (to give the kids and the older people a chance at
least ;)
* Added bonus to game score when player unlocks a secret tower
(5,000) and each time a player does the Death Blossom (250)
9/21/2008
* Decreased number of towers a player can sell on easy and medium levels (100
and 50--c'mon, too many :)
* Made it so towers that you sell before you begin playing the game (during
initial placement but you clicked on the wrong square) give you full money back
and don't count against your tower sell limit
* Added l337 sound effects for a secret tower, but since it's a secret I can't
tell you anymore about them
* Recalibrated gun tower's final upgrade range and attack speed
9/20/2008
* Made hard level harder
* Recalibrated the power and costs of the bomb and cannon towers (nerfed them a
bit)
* Implemented "it's a secret to everyone"--can you unlock a hidden tower?