Introduction

A tower-defense game is a type of strategy game where players will place down “towers”, usually with a form of in-game currency that will defend against a set of enemies. If you fail to defeat the enemies, you will typically lose health - when you reach zero, it’s Game Over.

In Bloons Tower Defense, the towers are monkeys, and the enemies are balloons, which spawn in rounds and travel along a pre-determined path. Your goal as a player is to strategically spend your currency while placing towers in effective locations, using their special abilities to win the game!

In this workshop, we will cover the fundamental aspects of a tower-defense game, and in future workshops, we will cover special abilities and ways that you can customize your game to make it your own!

In the first part of this workshop, you will learn about the logic behind the fundamental components in each level of a tower-defense game.

This includes:

• How to use Lists in Processing for Towers and Balloons
• How to create and customize Paths using a list of coordinates
• How to use Mouse Input to create a Drag-And-Drop System
• How to check if Balloons have reached the end of the path
• How to use pre-built template code

You will need to download Processing 4.0 from https://processing.org/download, or have Processing 3 or newer installed.

In our workshop, we will be adding code to several templates, which you can download below.