Post Your Dungeon Defense High Scores Here!

[MorganRoberts]

Do You Have What it Takes?

You’ve spent hours experimenting with countless strategies, assembling defenses to the n th degree of perfection, worn down the “M” and “G” keys till your fingers cramped and you have nothing to show for it?

If this sounds like You, why not post your High Score here!

A few rules on High-Score submissions:
1. Must be a picture at the moment of, or just before your Crystal Core explodes.
2. You may also include a snapshot of the High Scores list that will correspond with your in-game score for clarity.
3. Only 1-player high scores are accepted in this thread. Feel free to start a multi-player High Score thread.
4. Obviously no Photoshop or image manipulation of the high scores will be permitted.

At this time, Trendy Entertainment has currently reached a high-score of:
23542 @ Wave 12






Can You do Better?

[JeremyStieglitz]

Morgan, you're a strategic genius haha. I can't get past Wave 10... yet

Will post my high score soon!

-Jer

[javahawk]

Im with Jeremy. Wave ten is rough !!!

Josh

[Blade[UG]]

i thought it ended at wave 10? or was that just a goal because that's all the devs had beat at the time ..

I can't get past 4, game runs too slow at that point.

[MorganRoberts]

This demo actually goes on for infinity. We just said wave 10 in all fairness because it becomes insanely difficult at that point. The high scores in the game are currently just scores to aim for. The greater game currently in development, has each level with a set-amount of waves to complete.

I'm sorry to hear your FPS drops at around wave 4. During development, we took into consideration that as each incremental wave will have a pre-calculated amount of enemies on-screen at once to help cope with FPS. As a suggestion, you could try lowering your resolution and/or turning off Post-Processing (But it won't look anywhere near as colorful).

[JeremyStieglitz]

Yah, Blade also told me that he has a pretty slow computer, so it's very much related to his specs

But definitely with postprocessing disabled, the fillrate push on the GPU is much reduced!

-Jer

[RogueFighter]

u know what they say, devs are bad at their own games, i win!

[JeremyStieglitz]

LOL, well that's very very impressive RF!

However, we only KINDA believe you because technically it's easy to 'edit' the High Score list that's displayed there (it's simply contained in an INI... more recently we've switched to using DLL bind + data encryption for all saving, but not in that demo).

If you want us to bow to your skills with ironclad certitude (and ask you to be a playtester on our larger game), you'll need to post a gameplay shot that beats Morgan's score (preferrably just before your core busts). Then you'll have our attention to say the least haha!

Also if you don't mind telling, what strategy did you use to reach Wave 15? And did you then quit out of sheer exhaustion (it can happen), or did the enemies eventually overwhelm your defenses?

Regards,
Jer

[RogueFighter]

well, there are only 3 pathes to the core, so i setup my defenses there, one barrier, 4 magic towers, and 4 fireball towers.

and i did not quit, and the core did not burst, i died while trying to cast mana bomb

[JeremyStieglitz]

Ahhhh, sounds like you must have carefully tended to your setups in each area to reach Wave 15, that's mighty impressive. I don't suppose you get a gameplay screenshot before you died, to show us your victorious accomplishment in-game?

-Jer

[schizoslayer]

Bah I hit F9 to take a screenshot and it didn't do anything.

Anyway I got to wave 15 with 50318 using the same tactics as RogueFighter.

To be honest by this point I was kinda getting bored as all I had to do was run around keeping my blockades healthy and planting gas traps in front of them. I actually died trying to pull off a mana bomb near the end of the wave just for the heck of it.

Game definitely needs bigger badder enemies to turn up eventually rather than just more of them because they are quite easy to bottleneck at which point their superior numbers are useless to them. I felt that had I just played defence my computer would have given out before I would.

[schizoslayer]

Also my request for a feature: When your core explodes or you die pause the game and lets us flip between various cameras with the option to take screenshots as a button on the screen before we have to type our name in.

[MorganRoberts]

Bah I hit F9 to take a screenshot and it didn't do anything.

Anyway I got to wave 15 with 50318 using the same tactics as RogueFighter.

To be honest by this point I was kinda getting bored as all I had to do was run around keeping my blockades healthy and planting gas traps in front of them. I actually died trying to pull off a mana bomb near the end of the wave just for the heck of it.

Game definitely needs bigger badder enemies to turn up eventually rather than just more of them because they are quite easy to bottleneck at which point their superior numbers are useless to them. I felt that had I just played defence my computer would have given out before I would.

lol - Nice. Nothing beats gas-trap juggling. However, in the greater game, you can't do that anymore (it's been balanced quite a bit). We also took into consideration that narrow paths towards the core are too cumbersome, so now you have a much larger battlefield with many different entry points to be aware of.

[JeremyStieglitz]

Yep schizo, more difficult enemies, including kamikaze enemies that wreck towers and need to be prioritized, mage enemies that continually summon more enemies, flying enemies that can get past ground defenses, elemental enemies that deal different types of damage which Towers (and the player) can have unique vulnerabilities to (the final game has a four-elements balancing system), etc. As well as tougher variations on the standard enemies, among others, and some crazy bosses.

Of course, you can collect & upgrade armors and weapons that protect or deal elemental damage themselves, which can be useful against certain enemies etc.

It's quite sweet now, the current version we're working on... but yep, that demo's got some exploits once you find them, and there you go

-Jer

[RogueFighter]

"demo" does that mean eventually we will get 2 pay for this?

[JeremyStieglitz]

Heheh yep we're building out a commercial version of the game (which will actually be called "Dungeon Defenders" to avoid confusion) -- a very different thing than this prototype demo, which was intended purely as a taste of the direction we were taking (and a 4-week crazy test of rapid development), along with being open-source example for the community.

'Dungeon Defenders' is a robust & content-rich game, fully delivering on that mix of character-based Action RPG with Tower Defense (and the competitive/cooperative online components). Stay tuned, as we should have some announcement of it soon with a boatload of new media... that said, don't expect it to be particularly expensive. Not at all

(and 'Dungeon Defenders' will include its full UnrealScript source code too!)

-Jer

[Blade[UG]]

well, my computer specs are alright, though my video card is pretty crappy. I didn't play with the post process, but I will take a look at that.

[varfare]

I could play for infinity but it was killing me with monotony so I left the game. I wasn't even building gas traps. I could hold up one lane by myself with this 10shot staff upgrade :P

[kaamos]

Posted some pics, showing East, North and West.

As you can see, it was the 13th level, having all my defenses intact. Exams made me quit. So sad we don't have a Save feature.

Thoughts so far :

* need more monster diversity - the current ones are weak as they don't posses abilities and they can be easily CCed etc.
* need tower upgrades
* need more space
* need wizard abilities

I must say that the game is fun for the moment, but not for large bulks of time in a row. That happens because you have to do the same thing all over again, seeing the same monsters all over again, applying the same strategy every level.

At that point, I only had to move to each lane and build a PGT and repeating the process all over again each wave.

The quantity of monsters alone isn't scaling the difficulty as they end up blocking each other or clugging in various points of the map, leaving you enough time to actually build stuff right next to them.

The idea has a lot of potential regarding co-op but adding a lot more types of monsters with abilities, increasing the size of the paths etc.

I will come back later ( must get over the last 2 exams and I will try to lay out some clear suggestions ).

Overall, I had fun during 11 waves.

[JeremyStieglitz]

Yup, you got it kaamos! You have directly spelled out many of the things we have put into the version we're now working on, and beyond.

This demo was particularly useful to see where the core fun is, and where the strategy bottlenecks, and how to keep it getting progressively more challenging and more fun ad infinitum (and of course, the answers were not simply "more enemies").

We're confident that the next version we get out to the public is gonna be a full realization of the potential you can see here, effectively taking into account all of the best public feedback and our own experiences playing the thing (along with fully fleshed out RPG elements, character classes, equipments & upgrading, online play, yadda yadda). Honestly, with our latest internal build, we're essentially already there

Thanks for everyone's feedback, and lol varfare, that's hilarious

Hmm for fun later I'll post a script patch that will allow you to customize the difficulty should you so choose (in a very basic hacky way... faster and stronger enemies and more of them), and correspondingly provide a score multiplier. Of course, to use it you'd need to compile the DunDef script code youself...

-Jeremy

[Mobious]

I must say, this is an awesome new spin on one of my favorite game genres, and I can't wait to see the end product I gave the demo a shot w/ a friend of mine, and after 5 or 6 tries I ended up with a strategy that was pretty much invincible, which kinda bummed me out but I'm just glad this was only the demo

The best final score I managed was 79171 on Wave 18, and I could have easily kept going forever but with 10k enemies per wave at that point it was taking me 20-30minutes to kill them all, and at that point the boredom started to set in and ended up getting killed trying to cast a mana bomb XD I basically just put missile towers at the very top of the stairs and on the edge of the little wall/railing at the top as well so there was a line of 4 missile towers with 4 more behind on each corner and 2 flame towers in the center. I bowed the line at the top of the stairs inward toward the center crystal a little so any of the mele units had to walk into the range of all 2 rows of towers, rather than just getting hit by the front row. The towers on the railings only got damaged by the archers, seems the mele units either couldn't hit them or were only interested in taking a whack at the ones in the center.

The game got pretty monotonous once I got my final layout set up, turned into a game of "run around and repair things" after wave 9 or 10. I remembered reading somewhere, in one of the blogs maybe, that there's only a certain number of monsters allowed to be spawned in at any given moment to help keep the game running smoothly. That means that even though you made it to the next wave, and there's a larger number of guys, you're still going to get the same number of enemies in each "burst", if you will. So, if there's only, say 100 enemies allowed to spawn every time, you're basically just fighting more and more mini-waves of 100 mobs each, so any of the waves after about 10 are exactly the same in difficulty, just longer in length. If the enemies gained in HP and attack strength as the waves went on, at least for the beta it would keep things interesting (prolly something better in store for the retail version I would assume ), but either way the game is still fun, until it gets repetitive

I dunno if you guys are wondering how the game works on different hardware and systems, but for me on my laptop (nVidia 8600M GT, 2Gb memory, Intel T7500) it runs pretty horrid once you get up to higher levels, even at 800x600 w/ the postprocessing shut off.

I hosted a video of the wave if anyone wants to check out the tower arrangement I used. I was getting ~15fps constant after about wave 10 so the framerate in the video is sped up a bit for smoothness and so it didn't take up a full 15minutes XD

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FM_FaFSXq0

[Zomy]

I always die on Wave 5 XD.
Is really a good game.

[Piranhi]

Rofl, I came on here to say it's a great game, but I can only get to level 5. Now I feel so crap Gonna have another go with these tactics.

[Piranhi]

It's pretty hard defending the crystal if some get through purely because of the view, you need to make the stone arches transparent when the player is near them, or something along those lines.

[tidu]

It's pretty hard defending the crystal if some get through purely because of the view, you need to make the stone arches transparent when the player is near them, or something along those lines.

This is a good idea. I found myself clicking on the pillars a few times without realizing it.

[AdAstra]

@JeremyStieglitz
Thanks for the source code , I learned so much from it.
You should consider turning the camera with the middle mouse button, its a lot more easier to play this way.
Of course, you know how to do it , but here is how I did it(this may help if someone else wants to try it):

//DunDefPlayerController.uc:

var bool bMiddleMousePressed;

// bound to pressed state of middle mouse button in UTInput.ini
exec function MMB_Pressed()
{
	bMiddleMousePressed = true;
}

// bound to released state of middle mouse button in UTInput.ini
exec function MMB_Release()
{
	bMiddleMousePressed = false;
}

/*
                        MouseCoords = DunDefHUD(myHUD).GetMouseCoordinates();
                        
                        if(DunDefHUD(myHUD).IsOnLeftOfCanvas(MouseCoords,0.03) && PlayerInput.aMouseX < 0)
                            DunDefPlayerCamera(PlayerCamera).SpinCamera(PlayerInput.aMouseX*0.00002);
                        else if(DunDefHUD(myHUD).IsOnRightOfCanvas(MouseCoords,0.03) && PlayerInput.aMouseX > 0)
                            DunDefPlayerCamera(PlayerCamera).SpinCamera(PlayerInput.aMouseX*0.00002);
*/

                        if(bMiddleMousePressed )
                            DunDefPlayerCamera(PlayerCamera).SpinCamera(PlayerInput.aMouseX*0.00004);

[fuerchter]

had to leave the game, but i think i would have lost at this stage
but my game is as slow as a slideshow unfortunately

//EDIT:
by the way, will the cap of diamonds be set higher than 500 in the full game?
i've got so many questions about how the full game will be ^^

[KireDeath]

In anticipation of release I am submitting my high score. I can't wait for this game to come out! Especially online multiplayer. = )

[Blade[UG]]

went from 10k to 129k? nice lol

[KireDeath]

went from 10k to 129k? nice lol

Yeah...LOL! I got down my strat rather quickly. I was going to shoot for over 1 million but the game crashed having it minimized over night .

[Spejlo]

i stuck in front of my towers and they killed me

[KireDeath]

Doh! Yeah I hate when that happens.

i stuck in front of my towers and they killed me

[Fortier]

157970 @ wave 22





I had a lot of time to put into this last night...

Amazing game btw, I love the style of it.

[Rokit]

I wanted to see how far I could get by only upgrading my staff. Wave 5. 1755 pts. Heh.

[Toffstier]

Hi,
Fullscreen-Screenshot didn't seem to work, only got a screenshot of my highscores. As they don't top the wave22-guy, i won't bother to post it.

My highscrore was just a few hundred above 50.000 in Wave 15. I COULD have played longer, but actually i got a little bored. I played normally until wave 14, at which point i didn't build a single building anymore and waited at the crystal for the game to end. My defenses killed the whole of wave 14 and most of wave 15, when i finally got killed standing on top of one of the arches around the crystal (you can get there when you bild a barricade close to the crystal and hop up).

My strategy: Hog the crystal. Build a barrier and a missile tower each at level one directly at the bottom of the steps to the crystal. Add another tower each and Upgrade your weapon as Mana is available. after that, add Fireball Towers behind the Missile towers, then add F-Towers on the walkway between as close to the crystal as possible, and build barriers in front of them, too. Replace the M-Towers with F-Towers, and add more F-Towers on the walkways as far out as possible (so you can walk in-between). Add barriers behind which you can cast gas-traps and manabombs in front of these towers, too. Then add a 3rd and 4th F-Tower on each walkway. This plugs up the walkway quite a bit, so add a barrier BEHIND these F-Towers as well, so you can hop onto them more easily.
Upgrade Staff while the waves are coming and you're at 500 Mana anyway, best get behind your cristal so you don't get interrupted.
In the early stages, ignore the green Imps and concentrate on the black and reds, as the Imps don't pose a threat to your towers anyway, and you need to defend all stairs equally

At the begin of level 14 i had 12 Fireball-Towers watching each walkway, and some more towers watching these Towers. I had to repair some of the barriers quite often, don't neglect that.

TL;DR: Hog the crystal, don't bother about the imps. Can't wait for the release of the real game !