Inspiration
We all love playing tower defense games, but they are always single player! Using Apple's new iMessage kit for creating interactive iMessage apps, we made tower defense more social and exciting.
What it does
Through the iMessage extension, one user decides what enemies to send to the other user. The other user receives the text and sets up his defense as his opponent's minions begin to roll in. The defender has three lives, and every time an enemy reaches the end of the path he loses one. When the defending ends with a loss of all three lives or the defeat of all minions, the defender chooses the enemies for his opponent and the cycle repeats. After 3 rounds, the winner is decided by who has successfully defended the most.
How we built it
We used Apple's iMessage extension SDK to develop a concise and easy-to-use user interface for the user to navigate throughout the app. For the game mechanics, we used Swift with UIViews for the gameplay.
Challenges we ran into
We had to learn how to use the iMessage SDK because none of us had ever used it. None of us had made a game before either, so we had to learn the procedures for constantly updating the screen and performing calculations in real time.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
At the end of the hacking period, we have a fun, functional iMessage extension that integrates fluidly into an iMessage conversation. Our game also has nice 8-bit art with smooth animations.
What we learned
What's next for Tower Defriendz
Although Tower Defriendz is functional, we still want to add more types of enemies and towers. We also plan to integrate the A* algorithm for enemy pathfinding through a maze of towers acting as obstacles (currently the enemies follow a set path upon which towers cannot be built). After that, we plan to release Tower Defriendz to the AppStore for collecting feedback to further improve our product!
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