Lines and Boxes: Everything has its place

Problem: Everything has its place

Grids are cool because they are like little mini worlds. You can fill them with whatever you want and they can be used for all kinds of purposes. Since our tower game requires placement of towers, a grid was a perfect fit. While there is a great deal of freedom in what you can place and where, I had to impose some restrictions in order to make the game as realistic, intuitive and reactive as possible.

The first rule I set out to enforce was that you can only place one building/structure per tile. This prevented multiple buildings being placed in the exact same spot, as well as allows me to mark certain spots as off limits. We need to ensure that the lanes where the enemies travel cant be blocked off, and that things like the core of the base can't be built on top of. 

The second rule I imposed was a distance check. This is just a small calculation to see if a building is within a given distance to any of the grids. This allows me to snap a building from its current position to the next closest grid. It also allowed me to check whether or not a building was too close to another building.

Solution:

My solution, besides the distance checks and placement rules,  was to further mark the center of each grid tile, so that it was possible to visibly see where the building will stay once being placed.

It may seem like a really small thing to do, but it allowed for not only a better knowledge of how placement of towers worked for the player, but it also gives the ability to possibly divide these tiles further in the future. 

Another key aspect of the build system is allowing the player to choose what buildings to place down.  While incorporating this into the system it caused me to wonder if there truly was a need to be able to further divide tiles at run time. If a building is significantly smaller than a space, the player may not want to place it any as it reduces their active space. This is of course the kind of decision that must be made in a strategy game like this, but it is a possibility that I think we should consider for the future

Resolution:

While the build system is indeed functioning and very intuitive in the editor, we still have some room for improvement on the feature as the true game build lacks visual cues for the areas where the player can actually build. Things like textures on the ground will certainly help, but some sort of tint or coloring would go along way in making it feel more responsive.