Game Concept:

The idea of Defend the Village is that everyone playing will start off as a villager. All villagers will be part of the same village. Every day, the village will come under attack by a hoard of monsters and it's the villager's job (you) to make sure that the village can survive the attack to progress onto the next day. The attacks will get progressively more and more difficult to defend and it all ends (restarts) when the village falls.

 Like with all rpgs, each villagers will have there own unique stats and equipment. Players can level up their skills by doing actions which will help them perform that action better basically allowing them to specialize at certain tasks. To manage the pace of the game and add some complexity, players will have AP (action points) which re-fills overtime. This means that only so many actions that can be done in a day and players will need to co-ordinate with each other to best use their AP.

Target Initial Play test: November 2023  NOW

Features/ Systems Progress:

Player / Character (90%) - Players can register/login to an account and create characters or resume the game with a previous character. The character profile page is completed. Need to complete a leaderboard for showing who's the best villager in the village.

Equipment ( 60% ) - Every equipment will be unique and it can all be randomly bought with in-game currency. Equipping is completed and equipment can be shared through the village storage system. There's no plan to have a marketplace for buying/ selling as everyone is suppose to be on the same team here. Still need work on creating the list of equipment available and a system to "discover" them.

Buildings (70%) - All the buildings are defined and can be upgrade-able, need to add descriptions in-game on what different buildings do

Farm/Food (90%) - Food is used to quickly re-fill a character's AP and feed mercenaries. Players can use AP to generate food for the next day.

Mercenaries (100%) - Players can hire mercenaries to help defend the village... just make sure they're well fed or they'll turn on the village.

Nightly Attacks (10%) - Needs work... :(

Hosting/ Deployment (0%) - Can't be done until the game is completed

Links:

Game: DefendTheVillage.com

Discord: https://discord.gg/C3encYbT (for anyone that wants to chat, provide suggestions or help out)

Some Screenshots:

A lot of work has been done since the last post and a playable version is in sight. The focus the next 2 weeks will be on getting a priminiary system for the nightly attacks and start of hosting a playable version of the game.

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Player / Character (100%) - Players can register/login to an account and create characters or resume the game with a previous character. The character profile page is completed. A Leader board has been completed, showing who's done the most and who's hoarded the most gold.

Equipment ( 85% ) - Every equipment will be unique and it can all be randomly bought with in-game currency. Equipping is completed and equipment can be shared through the village storage system. There's no plan to have a marketplace for buying/ selling as everyone is suppose to be on the same team here. A new library system is added to "discover" new equipment. Ideally would like to populate with >30 unique equipment before testing starts.

Buildings (100%) - All the buildings are defined and can be upgrade-able. Added descriptions in-game on what different buildings do

Farm/Food (90%) - Food is used to quickly re-fill a character's AP and feed mercenaries. Players can use AP to generate food for the next day.

Mercenaries (100%) - Players can hire mercenaries to help defend the village... just make sure they're well fed or they'll turn on the village.

Nightly Attacks (10%) - Needs work... :(

Hosting/ Deployment (0%) - Can't be done until the game is completed

The big update is that the nightly attacks have been completed and initial testing shows that it's working as intended. Also I went ahead and added a new building called the Shrine which will deal with pleasing the gods in return for Hp. All in all the game is in a "playable" state locally and now the next major hurdle is to get it deployed online so everyone can start testing it out. The new targeted initial testing can be moved up to Mid October if everything goes smooth sailing.

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Player / Character (100%) - Players can register/login to an account and create characters or resume the game with a previous character. The character profile page is completed. A Leader board has been completed, showing who's done the most and who's hoarded the most gold.

Equipment ( 85% ) - Every equipment will be unique and it can all be randomly bought with in-game currency. Equipping is completed and equipment can be shared through the village storage system. There's no plan to have a marketplace for buying/ selling as everyone is suppose to be on the same team here. A new library system is added to "discover" new equipment. Ideally would like to populate with >30 unique equipment before testing starts.

Buildings (100%) - All the buildings are defined and can be upgrade-able. Added descriptions in-game on what different buildings do.

Farm/Food (100%) - Food is used to quickly re-fill a character's AP and feed mercenaries. Players can use AP to generate food for the next day.

Mercenaries (100%) - Players can hire mercenaries to help defend the village... just make sure they're well fed or they'll turn on the village.

Nightly Attacks (90%) - The nightly attacks have now been completed.

Hosting/ Deployment (0%) - next step

It feels like a long time since I've last done an update but I'm happy to say that hosting and deployment is completed!!! And with that completed, Defend the Village will now move on the the playtesting phase. The focus on the playtesting phase is to collect feedback on what worked well and what doesn't work. Hopefully find any smaller bugs and nothing game breaking shows up. If anyone would like to participate in the playtest, simply head on over to defendthevillage.com and register to start playing. 

The village has fallen and the playtest is over!! Overall, I'd consider this a successful initial first run with lots of bugs found (and fixed... which lead to more bugs lol). The big takeaway from the playtest is that there needs to be far more and better communication to the players. While there was a lot of content to explore, there was also a sense of new players becoming overwhelmed with all the different possibilities. The initial notification/ event system had far more bugs than expected and it was basically non-existent during login/registration. This has since been re-vamped with a completely different system. In-game #'s were able to be adjusted to have a more balanced game and EXP mismatches were found in the code. 

Moving forward and before the next playtest round, a Quest system will be added which will act as a tutorial and guide for new characters. Further in-game communication tools will also be investigated for players to co-ordinate with one another in game. Thanks you everyone who participated!!