Hero Tower Defense Thursday: Day 35 - HTD Pre-Alpha v0.015 Release! Nature Skills!

Want to get the legendary dogs? Shiny Mew? or any other shiny pokemon in the game? Adopt them today using SnD coins! Click here for more info.

Welcome to Hero Tower Defense Thursday!

HTD Logo

Go here to read Day 34 of Hero Tower Defense Thursday.

Play Hero Tower Defense!

This week we bring you the Native and Tier 1 Nature Skills! We now have skills for each Element! The graphics for Light and Nature are placeholders for now but we'll be filling them in with something nicer soon.

Nature Skills have a bit more focus on utility rather than damage or defense. It will still have those things but you'll see they are more strategic in nature, no pun intended. For example, the Nature Native Skill heals a little but also immobilizes (roots) the target for 3 seconds. Useful for catching enemies that could be running off or going after certain characters at the expense of healing them slightly. On the other hand you could be using it as stackable heal for a hero that is mostly stationary.

You might wonder why you would use the Native Skill to heal instead of the Water Nature which heals for more and that can be answered with two reasons. One being Nature has additional utility in that it can also be used on an enemy to root them as mentioned before. And two, is that if an enemy is using a Nature Skill of their own that counters the Water Native then it'll wipe out the Water heal while the Nature heal would be safe.

As I've said before this will all make more sense as more skills and such get added. Same goes for why you can target your own heroes with direct damage skills that typically one-shot them. There's a reason for this that hasn't been implemented yet and the damage/health ratios are skewed a bit right now so it's imbalanced. We'll be addressing this in due time though.

One of the next things I'll be figuring out is how pets will work. I talked about pets awhile back in this post and got a bunch of good ideas from you guys so I'll certainly be taking those into consideration. Of course, feel free to offer some in comments for this post as well if you like. We always enjoy hearing ideas and suggestions from our fans!


What's New:

-Added Nature Skills (Using placeholder graphics for now)


In the Works:

Design

• Story: Intro - Scene 1 (10%)
• Pet System (10%)

Graphics

• Inventory Screen (0%)
• Skill Selection Screen (0%)
• Light Skill: Radiate (Native) (10%)
• Light Skill: Shinning Strike(T1 Physical) (10%)
• Light Skill: Fleeting Light (T1 Magical) (10%)
• Unit: Fire Gecko - Movement (20%)

Programming

• Saving Inventory and Equipment Setup (0%)

Check out Kevin's blog, KXN @ HTD for HTD art-related concepts, WIPs, polls, and more!

Feel free to leave any feedback you might have in the comments, thanks!


-Dan

iPads at Nightingale

As well as the Acer Tablet we have also has a few iPads that the school has just purchased. More in another post on direct comparisons.

Below are some images of children in my class using the iPads. We where again doing some research using them to find out about the Tudors. They worked excellently with a QR code. The codes where on the board and printed out. It worked best from the printed copy.

 http://www.qrstuff.com/ is a great site allows you to quickly generate a code.

Unlike the Acer Tablets the iPads went straight to the site given by QR code. You didn't need to add sites unlike the Learnpad system.

More recently we used the iPads and laptops to start a reserach project on the local area. Interestingly when given a choice most of my class chose to use a laptop. 5 iPads where used though. We used street view to more closely investigate places near to the school. 

Children used print screen and word to record what places of interest they where finding. On the iPads we took a screen shot by holding down the power and home buttons, the imported into pages. Below is an example of what was done from one of my SEN children.