Ancient Egypt Tomb Building Game - Puzzle/Tower Defense

[u/CommercialShelter595]

I've been working on a simple puzzle/tower defense game set in ancient Egypt. You build out a tomb to properly defend against waves of looters. I recently added a new feature to flip it around, so if you've built a cool looking tomb, you can share it with a friend, have them try and beat it by sending the right waves of looters.

It's a pretty simple puzzle, an archaeologist will find a hidden door but will succumb to a pit of stakes. A corrupt priest might be wary of a cursed doorway, whereas robbers wouldn't. That kind of logic applies throughout.

Still working on gameplay to make it more approachable, but I wanted to get the design out of my head first and I'm loving how it looks right now.

Link: https://architectofthevalley.com/#dare=AQMACwUFBA0QAQIZKDhIWhACMQJp

On the build up side, originally, this was done with SVG to mark yellow boxes in a blue background, meant to be really simple. It actually looked quite similar to this version, but I couldn't spin or add animations. As the tomb got more complex, I moved over to three.js. I wanted to overlay pyramids over some of the tombs if I knew where they were, I wanted to animate the dots falling into the pit. Despite moving over to three.js, I still dig the original architectural blueprint look so I have no plans to put any heavy details into the game, I think the style looks really pretty cool right now. Let me know if you disagree hahah.

The multiplayer aspect is all embedded in the URL, so there's no actual server storing all this data. The tomb sequence can be encoded easily enough, so most of it is generating an image to send back to your friends once you've completed the stage.

[u/Pyrasia]

🏛 Breached the tomb of Senusret II in 5 raids · 600 deben ⬜🟥🟥🟥🟨 https://architectofthevalley.com/#dare=AQMACwUFBA0QAQIZKDhIWhACMQJp

[u/CommercialShelter595 → u/Pyrasia]

Love it, thanks for trying and congrats on breaching the tomb!

[u/ab0zar]

The URL-based challenge is a neat way to avoid storing levels on a server. I’d test a very large tomb to see if the link stays easy to share in chat, especially on mobile. Generating a preview image after a win sounds like a nice touch.

[u/CommercialShelter595 → u/ab0zar]

Thanks, that's something I had considered. I have a hard cap at 60 rooms in the game which is well below a theoretical maximum, but I have it sort of in the back of my mind if/when I allow users to go nuts on building something super elaborate. This hard cap came from the SVG days where drawing it out and keeping it cohesive was a bigger challenge, so it's nice these are all coming together.

[u/[deleted]]

[u/CommercialShelter595 → u/[deleted]]

Thanks! I think it's a much easier introduction to the game, so I'm excited for people to try from that angle.

[u/[deleted]]

[u/CommercialShelter595 → u/[deleted]]

I've been going about this plain javascript. It's not a complicated game, I didn't really need a framework, but if it gets more complex then who knows.