It’s been a little while since my last development blog for Sentinel 4: Dark Star, so it’s time to talk about another brand new feature in the game:
The Stronghold
In my last blog I talked about the Sentinel series always having things that can be defended, damaged and repaired. I’ve always felt that enemies destroying the final barrier or running off the map never felt like an adequate situation for losing a game. So now each map contains your Stronghold – your main building which the enemy have to destroy for you to lose.
New Resources
The Stronghold is no ordinary building. It has its own resources which charge up over time (much like the orbital weaponry of the Sentinel) and many abilities which can be triggered as a final line of defence against the aliens.
During the game extra generators can be purchased to increase the speed at which the Stronghold charges. This gives the player a strategic choice of saving cash for turrets, or spending it on increasing the Stronghold’s power.
Abilities
This new building’s first job is to control the drones. They are now all bought with the Stronghold’s resources and use it as a home base. The Stronghold also has a range of moves which can be triggered such as a Slow Shockwave, Emergency repair, or even a targettable nuke!
These new abilities give you plenty more options whilst you’re playing. Specifically when you’ve spent all your money and it doesn’t seem quite enough to hold back the onslaught, you now have another string added to your bow. Often a well placed nuke or a couple of attack drones can save you from defeat, and earn you enough cash to upgrade your turrets.
Control
Moving the drones to the Stronghold has cleaned up the existing UI. I never thought the repair drones and drone controls fitted very nicely alongside the Sentinel’s weaponry. Adding lots of new things to trigger and new resources to manage does present some challenges though. My main focus is to make things as automatic as possible, to minimise the amount of micromanagement you have to do with the game’s systems.
I’ve never liked unnecessarily manual systems for mobile tower defence games as it’s usually too fiddly. I think things such as target selection should be clever, not manual, but this is for another blog post. In terms of the new features in Sentinel 4, I’m currently removing as much as I can from the main interface in favour of tapping on the objects themselves to bring up their related moves and controls. I’ve also got ideas for setting auto-trigger options for example to continually build attack drones with your resources which may be useful to further reduce unnecessary player intervention and free you up to concentrate on your strategy.
The enormous new campaign in Sentinel 4 is coming along nicely. We’re determined to make this the finest tower defence game it can be, and we are sure you won’t be disappointed with the result.
cheers,
Paul
