Verses Mode idea
Considering the game is now multiplayer, how about a new verses mode?
Basically the idea is one player plays as normal and sets up traps, but the other player plays on the orcs side!
When the game begins the player on the orcs side will have a certain amount of money for example 10,000, Along the bottom of the screen where the trap hotkeys would normally be would be your different enemy types and there price, so for example a regular orc would cost 50 coins.
When you click an enemy type it will subtract the cost of that enemy from your total money and that enemy will enter the level and run for the rift like normal.
Something like a regular orc would be really cheap so you could spam it and send loads at once, however something more powerful like a Fire Ogre could cost more like 1,000.
So how do you earn money playing as the orcs? Every rift point you take from the other player could earn you 1,000, so if you kill the other player you will get 3,000. Also destroying barricades or killing guardians should earn you money too, maybe 100 for a barricade you destroy and 500 for every guardian you kill.
There would be a lot of strategy to this, learning the best combinations of enemies to send to give the other player the hardest time possible.
It should be 8 rounds with each round lasting 1-2 mins, if the normal player loses all there rift points then the player on the orcs side will win, however if you still have rift points at the end then the defending player wins!
Also the player on the orcs side should be able to play as one of the mobs they spawn, so for example if they pay 1000 for a frost ogre then there should be an option for the player to enter the ogre and play as him.
Please post your suggestions and if there good I'll add them to the main concept :)
If I get to play as a frost ogre, there are places on several maps where I can be more intelligent than the average mob and sneak past a lot of traps (fall off edges onto places nearer the rift. I can also keep going past any guardians instead of attacking them, or intentionally attack barricades that don't fully block my path.
There needs to be a shortcut for "send 5"; right click would work.
To clarify, you aren't suggesting there is a way to destory traps that normally can't be destroyed, right?
There should be a limit on how much currency you can spend in a rolling 10 or 15 second time frame to prevent pilling all your units up at once (especially in the early game). It may increase slightly with each wave. (There could also be multiple limits of differing lengths.)
The orc player needs to receive currency at the start of each wave, not start with all of it; unless timer-based spend limits (as above) prevent over-powering waves of orcs early on, and ensure there will be money left for the last wave.
Waves should have a countdown until the orc player can't send more orcs (orc player can't send orcs one at a time forever to run up the clock). Waves should also end if the orc player hasn't sent any orcs for a while (give him a 5-10 second warning of course). This keeps the game punctual, even if time is not a component of the skulls given. The last wave should have a much longer max timer so the orc player can use all his currency if he chooses to.
Some of these sorts of things could be match settings. A message should let the player who isn't making the settings know what has been changed from default. A cascading menu with +/- buttons would allow a main heading of "changed orc spawn rate settings" to be a single item, but allow the player to easily check what exactly was changed if they care.
Hmm, Some very interesting points!
An idea for how the mob control could work, once you take control of the selected mob they should still follow the normal path they would normally take so for example you can use 'W and 'S' to move forwards or backwards along the designated path and perhaps with a little leeway to each side as well (Perhaps like an invisible wall along the designated path), This way you can't just run off in any direction you feel like!
I think the idea to rightclick to send multiple at once is a great idea!
You can't destroy traps you normally wouldn't be able too, that would be very overpowered, you can only destroy barricades and guardians.
As for how much you can spend in a time frame, perhaps a better idea would be a cooldown after sending so many of any particular given mob, so for example if u send off 20 normal orcs there would then be a 5 second cooldown before you can send any more, or if you send an armored ogre there could be a 20 second cooldown before you can send another, same as how a lot of the trinkets work.
I like the 5-10 second inactivity warning and the longer last wave idea.
These are some fantastic improvements to the base idea and I'll edit the first post to include them! :)
Edit: Hmm, why is there no 'edit' button on the first post?
There is an edit button. It took me a while to find too and I've had to tell many people. It is in the top left of your post, as a tab next to "post reply". (Above your profile picture.) This is so you can use extra options like changing the title of the thread and moving it to a different forum. It may be better not to move too many unnecessary details to the OP though; design is a process and nothing is set in stone until shipped (and we aren't the ones shipping!). Putting important ideas that are generally agreed upon there is good, but ideas for implementation and things still in discussion should be left in the rest of the thread. (I say this as I don't know what all you want to put there, please don't take it as an offense. Wall of text OPs discourage participation.)
Mob control: I feel like having that sort of limitation is too severe. Maybe we can't willingly jump or go off edges as an orc unit (we could still be pushed off by physics traps). I really would like to be able to choose which path to take on some maps for instance. I think the attacking barricades is just part of what a defending player will have to deal with; they need to notice the player controlled unit and deal with them. Moving in a narrow lane isn't fun, and even more so if it isn't clear where that lane is; faint red lines showing where you are allowed to move would be better than invisible walls.
Spawn rate: I agree that a rolling window might be harder to understand, but I feel that it would lend the player greater flexibility than a simple timer on each unit does. Some sort of queuing function might also be needed and a good solution may incorporate a bit of both limitations. My reason for liking the rolling window is that I can choose to send a smaller number of large units, or a larger number of small units; individual timers encourage me to spam everything together and forces balance to be based on a "every unit all at once" approach. A rolling timer also gives a better ability to "save up" spending power and unleash it all at once, whereas timers encourage clicking the button as soon as its ready.
The rolling timer is not super intuitive though, so here is how I would implement it: A bar chart that has one bar for each second. If a bar is at zero, you spent 0 currency that second, and if it is at the top, you spent a large amount of currency that second. Every second a new bar is added to the right and the whole chart shifts to the left by one. Next to the chart is a single meter that fills up. It shows the area covered by the bars in the chart (total currency spent in the chart's time frame). If that integral bar would be pushed above full by a purchase, it can't be made. The chart just helps show how that limit will move up or down so the player can time their attacks better. There could be two integrals that track different lengths of time (the bars that belong to the longer duration only could be a different color, or brackets could indicate what duration belongs to each bar), so that there is control over both sub parts of waves, and also between large wave sets.
If you didn't understand that (I understand it, but I wrote it :) ), I can try to make some drawings and post them, but it would be a bit before that happens.
I didn't see any mention of controls, and now discussing how I would play as an ogre, I realize I want to choose my spawn door. So what if, by default, the player is a shadow-like character (probably visible to the defender, but unaffected by traps) that cannot attack directly. However, the player can observe the defenses and how well the orcs are doing. The attacker can use a button in this mode to take control of an orc (orc may need to be near a spawn for this to work though) or release it back to the AI. To spawn your units, you simply stand near a spawn (boundary of what counts as near a spawn may be shown with golden lines on the floor) and choose units essentially the same as a trap. A pair of buttons serve to jump forwards and backwards between doors (you are actually teleported).
The alternate set of controls is an overhead view, but with floor and ceiling traps, multiple layers in some places, and the fact that I don't think the game is designed to support such a view, I don't think it would work well.
Sorry for the wall, but I'm really enjoying this discussion and hope I'm not hijacking your idea.
Spam. Don't reply to it.
I think the best idea for vs would be just a score thing. I kind of like the idea of playing the orcs.. but it wouldn't even be remotely the same game.
What I would like to see one of two things... simply have a level you play independently that have a synced game clock. So you log in to the level together, both players hit start, there is a count down and then the game runs just like it dose in solo, this time the score screen at the end is split. The game is won based on score.
The other way would be for both players to be on the same map like in co-op, but have separate paths that do not intersect. So it is like 2 small maps. What this would allow would be cool ways you could put traps and stuff on your opponents map to screw them over, maybe have a special guardian that is a free slot that takes say 30 seconds to remove a trap from the other player. But this could be fun a score based on each player, but the ability to add traps in a negative way to stop there score form going up. Something like that might be cool.
If I get to play as a frost ogre, there are places on several maps where I can be more intelligent than the average mob and sneak past a lot of traps (fall off edges onto places nearer the rift. I can also keep going past any guardians instead of attacking them, or intentionally attack barricades that don't fully block my path.
There needs to be a shortcut for "send 5"; right click would work.
To clarify, you aren't suggesting there is a way to destory traps that normally can't be destroyed, right?
There should be a limit on how much currency you can spend in a rolling 10 or 15 second time frame to prevent pilling all your units up at once (especially in the early game). It may increase slightly with each wave. (There could also be multiple limits of differing lengths.)
The orc player needs to receive currency at the start of each wave, not start with all of it; unless timer-based spend limits (as above) prevent over-powering waves of orcs early on, and ensure there will be money left for the last wave.
Waves should have a countdown until the orc player can't send more orcs (orc player can't send orcs one at a time forever to run up the clock). Waves should also end if the orc player hasn't sent any orcs for a while (give him a 5-10 second warning of course). This keeps the game punctual, even if time is not a component of the skulls given. The last wave should have a much longer max timer so the orc player can use all his currency if he chooses to.
Some of these sorts of things could be match settings. A message should let the player who isn't making the settings know what has been changed from default. A cascading menu with +/- buttons would allow a main heading of "changed orc spawn rate settings" to be a single item, but allow the player to easily check what exactly was changed if they care.