Operation Flytrap

Operation Flytrap was my entry for the SJSU Game Dev Club's second competition of spring 2009. It is a tower defense game with original gameplay, and it won second place!





Operation Flytrap was a larger project, at 2700 lines, even though it was mostly developed in two weekends.
It was written in Free Basic: development was smooth, but new tricks such as a primitive button object and path finding with Dijkstra's algorithm were successfully integrated. Sound was mostly made in SFX (and then borrowed from UltraBreaker), and the music from Modarchive was also reused from other games I've made. GFX were made by a friend and borrowed from other games; see the readme for details.

Gameplay was based somewhat one Desktop Tower Defense and Bloons, but has some major changes. Instead of the towers doubling as walls (which the creeps have to go around), the creeps can fly over the towers, but not around trees. Also, there are positionable checkpoints on the map, and the creeps have to visit each one, so the creeps stay on the map longer. Positioning of trees, checkpoints, etc. change the gameplay significantly, so there are over 20 maps included with the game. I played the game for several hours recently (awhile after completing it), and was surprised how fun it is, and how high the scores go with some good strategy.

There are four types of towers, and with the exception of the super-cheap tower, you'll want to use all of them. The "normal" tower fires at a specific creep, and the mega tower works similarly, but costs almost 50x more. A fully-upgraded normal tower might be a better deal, but you can only fit so many towers on the creeps' path, and will want the best towers when you can afford them. The last type of tower shoots at a certain part of the map; it might miss the target, or it might hit multiple creeps if they are near the explosion. If you position it to work like this, it will be very effective: the tower fires at a creep when it is at position X; the creep then moves and arrives at a checkpoint, and turns around to go to the next checkpoint; it then returns to point X when the tower's missile explodes. So you want the distance from this type of tower to a nearby checkpoint to be proportional to the speed of a certain wave.

Try to beat my scores; I didn't cheat.

This game is mentioned here:

• SJSU Game Dev Site
• Main Thread
• Free Basic Games Directory
• My SJSU-related Website
• Facebook (game fan page)

The game can be downloaded here:

• Zapdown (instant-play)
• Operation Flytrap (with source)