Vilify - An Introduction

Written on November 20, 2014

Hello world!

Vilify is an open-source html5 game that is currently a work in progress. The premise behind Vilify is that you are a mad scientist who has just completed a world destruction device. Heroes from all over the world are racing to your lab to destroy it before you set it off. Now with ten minutes left on the timer, you are in a race against time to defend it from those pesky heroes. Build abominable towers and create vile monsters to defend your lab!

Vilify is loosely contained within the genre of being a tower defense game, though it has many of the elements and mechanics of a platformer game too.

Objective: Your doomsday device is set to go off in ten minutes! Don't let the heroes destroy it before then.

Heroes:
Heroes spawn on the left side of the screen and move rightwards. If a hero reaches the right side of the screen before the doomsday device goes off, you lose. Checkout the game guide for all the heroes in the game and their stats.

Defenses:
You can stop heroes from reaching your doomsday device via two methods: building towers and creating monsters.

  1. Towers are built on the roof of your lab. They fire bullets, missiles, laser beams and other stuff down at heroes below. Towers last indefinitely (or at least until you are overrun by the heroes and have to restart the game). The player can tap on a tower to activate its special abilities, if it has one. Checkout the game guide for a list of towers that the player can build and their stats.
  2. Monsters patrol the ground (and/or the air, if they can fly) of your lab. They enter direct combat with heroes and, unlike towers, can die. However, they tend to do more damage than towers and block heroes' movement towards your doomsday device. The player can control a monster by swiping from the monster to a point to make the monster move to that point. The player can also tap on a monster to activate special abilities, if it has any. Checkout the game guide for a list of monsters that the player can build and their stats.

Items:
When the player defeats an enemy the player can get items. Items are the currency of the game - they are what the player uses to purchase towers and monsters. There are 3 types of items:

  1. Tech
  2. Chemical/Biological (the final name for this category is not yet decided)
  3. Alien
We often abbreviate the items to their first letter: T, C & A for Tech, Chemical, and Alien respectively. A player's items are stored on the right of the screen (see the image below). To purchase a new tower with an item, the player drags an item to an unbuilt tower spot on the roof. To purchase a new monster, the player drags an item to the lab floor (i.e. the bottom of the screen). In order to upgrade an existing tower or monster, the player can drag an item to that tower or monster. The rank of a monster or tower depends on the number of items spent on it: a newly created tower/monster will be rank 1, and for each item spent to upgrade the tower/monster, it will be a rank higher. At most, a tower or monster can be upgraded 2 times. Therefore, the highest rank a monster or tower can reach is 3. The type of a tower or monster depends on the items spent on it. The monsters and towers pages from the game guide have all the towers and monsters listed by the types of items need to make them. Cyborg - a rank 2 monster - is denoted by [TA] meaning that the cyborg is either a monster created by a Tech item and upgraded with a Alien item or a monster created by an Alien item and upgraded with a Tech item.

So that about wraps up the primary mechanics of the game. If you have any questions stop by our HipChat to discuss them. Also, we'd love your help turning Vilify into a reality so checkout our contribute page when you've got some spare time!

Peace out,
- Logan