I posted the other day about these cute little soldier units that get produced by the Barracks building. It was one of those neat little ideas that pops into my head. Usually when I’m on the bog.

The trouble with neat ideas is sometimes they don’t quite fit in The Grand Scheme Of Things. What is the point of the little soldiers? They fire little lasers which are quite good at vanquishing the weedier gidrahs, especially when there’s a whole load of them, but they’re otherwise not so good at anything with any armour. You’d be better off just buying a heavy blaster. So what’s the point of the little guys?

“Oh no!” you cry. “Don’t take the wee soldiers out, they’re so cute!”

Fear not! I figured out what I’m going to do with them. And it followed another little extra new idea I’ve had on the bog, and subsequently implemented. Angry Gidrahs!

Angry Gidrahs

Each alien spawn point emits waves of aliens, with a little gap in between each wave, until the level ends. What I’ve added is the probability that the last alien emitted in a wave is one of these so-called angry gidrahs. An angry gidrah looks like its normal counterpart, except it’s a little bit bigger, and has some sort of special attribute that makes it a lot nastier (and worth 5x as much to shoot). And with a bit of Chazification, it will also be red and smoke slightly. The frequency that angry gidrahs appear depends on how good you are. They’re a bit like mini-bosses.

So some of the things that distinguish angry gidrahs from their smaller, more serene brethren are: 5x as many hitpoints; moves twice as fast; has a weapon; has a special tactical brain; and … spawns gidlets! (Amongst other ideas) Gidlets are teeny tiny little aliens which are the counterpart to the little soldier guys. A gidlet is too small to be targeted by turrets! And they run right through barriers and minefields unimpeded. So you need little soldiers to go running after them before they reach a building and start bashing it. So soldiers by preference now chase after gidlets before they’ll start attacking the bigger gidrahs.

Because gidlets are produced in relatively large numbers and they’re so small, they only do half a point of damage to a building when they hit it as opposed to the full point caused by a gidrah. Angry gidrahs are also good and tough and can bash a building up to four times before they finally croak.

Flying Gidrahs

Also this week sees the introduction of flying gidrahs, which predictably completely ignore minefields and barriers and even rocks and just fly straight past. If they were allowed to just fly straight at the base and collide the game would probably be over in short order which wouldn’t be very fair, so these gidrahs work in a slightly different way to ordinary gidrahs. They will instead fly in a straight line straight from their spawn point directly over their target and then off towards the opposite point on the map, thence to respawn a bit later. En route they will be firing guns or dropping bombs on anything they fly over.

Unlike in other tower defence games we won’t be making you put down a special kind of turret to waste them. Your ordinary guns will do just fine.  Even soldiers will take a pot shot.

Wraiths

More sinister than flying gidrahs are wraiths. Wraiths are actually going to be a kind of angry gidrah, so they won’t be too common. Which is just as well! Because they can move unimpeded through barricades and minefields and, yes, walls too. It gets worse! They can only be harmed by capacitor fire, not ordinary turrets.

Gidrahs with Guns

It had to happen sooner or later. Some of those gidrahs are armed! They’ll occasionally take a pop at anything they walk past that’s in range, significantly increasing their threat level. The only useful countermeasure is to shoot them first by having a blaster with a really long scanning range. They shoot right over barricades so that won’t be any help. Or you can bung a bunch of shield generators down and hope the gidrahs walk into blaster range before the shields all get used up.

That’s it for development news for today. Over and out.