Flash game
Marbles TD

This game was made in the course Interactive Multimedia during my education Graphic Design and Web Development. It was a project where the task was to create something in Flash. The requirements weren’t that strict, you could do pretty much anything you wanted, in a few specific categories. One being Game, which I chose since I love programming. The game could be very simple, but to challenge myself I went for a larger and more advanced game.

My choice was to make a tower defence game of some kind. In this kind of game, there are enemies coming from one point and moving towards another point, usually through some kind of maze. The player’s task is to stop the enemies from reaching the target, by placing towers on the map. Those towers will then shoot on the enemies and for each killed enemy the player gets one point and some money, which can be used for buying new towers. If too many enemies reach the target the game is over and the player’s score is shown.

The theme wasn’t set until pretty late, so I started with building the structure and basic functionality first. I use an alpha map behind the scenes to sense where the path is, which makes it easy to create new maps (just one graphic image and one alpha image). In my implementation of this though, the path had to go in straight lines, not curves or diagonals.

To make the whole project structured I coded everything in separate .as files with classes for different things. Everything was loaded dynamically from the Flash library, so the .fla didn’t contain any code or anything except the library. I also tried to optimize the perfomance of the game as good as I could.

I created three different towers with their own specific properties: crossbow, catapult and cannon. All towers allow one upgrade and you can also sell the tower. The enemies change color for each level, and they also get increased health to be harder to kill. The reward for each enemy is increased at a little slower rate.

Although the game wasn’t the easiest thing I’ve coded, one of the hardest things about it was to set the difficulty levels, so they weren’t too easy and not too difficult.

Please, try the game below!