Firewal - In Development Facebook Game

“Firewal” is a Tower Defence game in development created for Facebook that was written by a team of university students. The idea was not to have ground breaking mechanics but to create a visually appealing game that players would keep coming back to. The game was coded in C# using the XNA library, and was integrated with Microsoft’s Silverlight using Silversprite.

The idea of having a Tower Defence styled game came from the fact that majority of people who use Facebook don’t use it for hours on end, so we wanted to create a game that people could spend anything from 10minutes to an hour on. We used vector styled graphics to keep it simple, and whilst the game is still incomplete, we aim to continue using this style so that users can easily tell what things do and how it works.

At the moment, there are 5 towers, 3 enemy types and 10 maps – however more are planned and can easily be integrated. I also helped write a small Map Maker for the game; the maps are generated by a single text file which is read by the game and represented on screen. The Map Maker generates these files which can be placed into the games folder and loaded easily. 

The types of towers are: projectile, a single shot fired at an enemy; a laser, a continuous attack; a rocket turret, which explodes on impact; a poison turret, which poisons the enemy causing them to take damage over time; and a slow turret, which slows down the enemies movement speed.
The 3 enemies types are: weak and fast; slow and strong; and standard (medium strength and speed compared with the other two).

So far we have user data integrated with Facebook, which gets their Facebook idea, and retrieves their scores based on that ID from our SQL server. The scores are unique for each person, and are stored if the score beats their previous best. Plans to add a levelling system and leader-board system are being considered.

As development progresses we are also creating a Java port.


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