Also sim games, where you can build a world or city or house or country or whatever. What kind of games allow you to create things that you enjoy showing off? What kind of games have things in them that interest you enough to want to see someone else's creations?

-Deozaan (January 19, 2011, 10:29 PM)

And lets not forget puzzle games. The Incredible Machine, Chu Chu Rocket, Lemmings, ... Uh... and others. Those are pretty easy to add content (levels) that could help create a community.

-Deozaan (January 19, 2011, 10:43 PM)

A sim game would be easy to extend, but hideous to get started.

A puzzle game on the other hand would be nice, but they generally exhaust their level ideas fairly quickly.

Oh, and please don't double-post.

Sure, it's probably fairly trivial to add a new kind of tower or enemy type in a TD game, but the hard part is in the balance. Some problems that plague TD games are that (1) you could beat them using just one or two kinds of towers. (2) One strategy worked on every level. (3) Or another problem I've seen a lot is with the difficulty (which also has to do with balance, IMO). You'd be doing great for 86 waves and then suddenly it became impossible.

-Deozaan (January 19, 2011, 10:14 PM)

Why not have the game choose a random subsection of the total number of towers at the start of the level?  If you don't have the Flamethrower tower all the time, you can't possibly use the strategy based around it.

And if it does get impossible, why not simply design a few waves in the middle, or make a tower that might be useful in that situation.  Of course, balance is always going to be an issue, and creating an overpowered tower would definitely be an issue.  
I do have a solution around here somewhere though.  

A while back, I started work on a procedurally generated TD game.  The computer would score the power of your setup, based on a combination of dps and how well the last wave fared. It would then generate a wave which is slightly stronger than it thinks you can handle.  I designed it based on the L4D2 Director - It targets weak points, and subtly throws wave after wave against them (I had a game where it threw five or so flying waves in a row,and then a fast ground wave when it realized I was onto it) :P

In what way(s) could people contribute to a tower defense game? Obviously coders could help program, artists could make graphics, and musicians could help with music or maybe sound effects, but in what other ways would someone be able to contribute to a TD game?

-Deozaan (January 19, 2011, 09:43 PM)

I think level design is often underrated. Also, the tedious things that those high-falutin' coders overlook, like documentation, help, tutorials. Ooh, and my favourite: play testing!

-timns (January 19, 2011, 09:45 PM)

A lot of design/concepting stuff can be done by just about anyone.  This includes:

• Level Design
• Tower Design
• Enemy design
• The name :P

On the coding side, there are a lot of different skill sets here at DC. How would/could/should things be setup to let the maximum number of people participate?

I am a bit bias, but .NET would let anyone write in any language and the core game could then consume libraries (DLLs). It would also allow for specialized things like DSP or math-heavy stuff to be done in a functional language like F#, while other things were done in C++ or whatever.

-Renegade (January 19, 2011, 09:51 PM)

My personal preference would be to build the base in XNA (.NET), and load plugins for the content.  The way I envision it, the base game has very little in it, and uses the plugins to make a completely modular game.  (And we might even be able to do some funky stuff like reusing the monsters directly into an RPG game, if we design it right :D)

The link appears to be dead. :(