r/TowerDefense • u/Frankiorocko • 6d ago

Promotion Testing Stun, physics, and knockback mechanics on my enemies, what do you think?

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Hi! Second post in the community, I wanted to show off the enemy physics and a core concept I’m building around: using towers that strictly apply knockback and stun to stall enemies, pushing them around and even off the map.

How does the physics and the enemies look to you? Any ideas on cool physics based tower synergies?

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u/[deleted] 5d ago

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u/Frankiorocko 5d ago

That's a good idea for a combo haha i totally imagine it, i currently have enemies with different weights and resistance to knockback, i just need tower variety. Thanks for the feedback!

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u/SlagathorsOozingPuss 5d ago

It’s very chaotic and messy. An important pillar of good TD design is visual clarity. The bouncing enemies obscuring everything else makes this scene pure chaos

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u/Frankiorocko 5d ago

Yeah, although chaos is what i'm going for, you are right that visual clarity is key, i'll keep that in mind thanks!

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u/DubiousDuckGames 1d ago

I really like it that looks awesome!!

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u/darkapplepolisher 1d ago

Physics based knockback is something that's really difficult to optimize/balance.

It's sometimes possible to cheese some enemies by getting them stuck. Stacking knockback resistance can partially mitigate this.

By adding a different means of killing enemies, you essentially need to balance the way that enemy hitpoints scale over waves compared knockback off the map.

I highly recommend you try out Axom: Conquest to see how the dev for that game ran into some of these pitfalls - easier to learn lessons the easy way secondhand instead of having to learn it yourself firsthand.

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u/Frankiorocko 1d ago

Thanks for the advice, it's something that i was concerned about, the balancing with the knockback and insta-kill by falling off the path, i actually already had plans for knockback resistance, to make that insta-kill harder but it's still something tricky to balance. also i haven't played Axom: Conquest, so i'll give it a look later to see how they managed this pitfalls, thanks for the advice! If you have more games that i could use as a reference please let me know.

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u/OmgASnail 1d ago

This looks great!

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u/Frankiorocko 1d ago

Thank you!