People who know me on Facebook may be aware that I recently took a break from Icefall to focus on networking code.

I plan for networking to form an important part of Icefall’s gameplay: the game itself is not realtime multiplayer, however I plan for an ‘Auction House’, scoreboards/leaderboards/server-firsts, player-to-player mail, and other online community-type features.

BUT I have never worked with any networking code of any complexity before, and I determined that trying to ‘learn while I go’ during the Icefall development process would not be the best idea. Hence, Citadel!

Citadel is a ‘tower-defense’ game. For those unfamiliar with the concept, essentially an endless wave of bad guys (in this case, tanks, jets, armoured cars, and trikes) try to get to and destroy your tower. Your job is to build a system of defensive towers to prevent them from doing that. The towers themselves automatically aim and fire, the strategy lies in placing the right towers and walls in the right places to do as much damage to the invaders as possible.

Each wave of invaders is tougher than the last, and eventually they will overwhelm your defenses. However, each invader you kill will give you some credits to spend on additional defense, and you receive more credits for tougher invaders. So the object is to last as long as possible, try to save money for the strongest towers (the Tesla Coil), and ultimately get a big score.

As far as tower-defense games go, Citadel currently isn’t that sophisticated (it’s a beta version, after all!) and doesn’t have upgradable towers or multiple game types or anything like that, but it does have a unique feature that I couldn’t find in any other Tower Defense games anywhere: it can do multiplayer. Get a friend on a LAN, or over the internet (hook up a voice-chat program like MSN or Ventrilo!) and you can join forces to get the highest scores. It’s competitive co-operative: you share the same base and it’s game over when an invader reaches it, but who does the most damage to the creates gets the most credits for the kill, and the most score at the end.

NOTE: The invaders MUST ALWAYS HAVE *some way* to get through. Even if they have to go ridiculously long ways around crazily long mazes and queue up single file, it is against the rules of tower defense games to block them off completely. If you do that, it’s immediately game over!

Try the demo! If you don’t like it, that’s fine – but if it works (especially the networking part), or if it doesn’t work and you tell me about it and I work with you to make it work, then you’re helping me to make sure Icefall’s online components are awesome when they come out!

Download the beta demo here and let me know in the comments what you think, if it works, or (more importantly!) if it doesn’t work, or (MOST importantly!) what your high score is 🙂