What is Efencea?

Efencea is another defense game, akin to Castle and the many others. However, Efencea has unique features. Let's begin with that.

In Efencea there are two generic races, or factions, that players may choose. Robots and Aliens, which are green and purple respectively. Sadly enough, I just realized those were my high school colors. Color is sort of a neat feature in the game, as, according to Tayoko, the artist, there are only 14 colors used in the entirety of the game--interface, icons, everything. So what? Two races means what? Two players! Again, so what? Two players, Castle has more than that. Versus! Yes, Efencea is a two-player versus defense game.

Players will be taking turns at offense and defense, both trying to get units through the other player's defenses. For this, the game features a wave maker:


The wave maker is a simple pop-up that allows players to build waves rather quickly via mouse. Waves are composed of up to 7 unit types within a 3x6 grid. That's 3.2 quadrillion combinations, really, 1,628,413,597,910,449 combinations, for each faction. There's also the matter of duration of the waves, too, which adds more, but that's harder to calculate.

Duration, is the length of the spawned wave. It allows the player to extend the repetition of their wave formation out. Each point in duration is one row of the formation. For example, a duration of six is one full wave of the players constructed formation--all 18 places on the formation are sent once and a duration of 12 is the formation twice over.

The defending player builds his towers by clicking on his walls and selecting one of the four tower types from another pop-up:


(I've been meaning to request a removal of the ugly grid cell padding to the left of atoms by BYOND staff, as seen in the miniviewer in the pop-up.)
Towers have several stats, which are upgradeable through experience, earned by killing units, as seen here:


Range and splash are not measured in typical BYOND range. As such, a range of one does not encompass the eight tiles surrounding the tower, but rather, a nostalgic four cardinally-adjacent tiles. A screenshot would serve well to demonstrate this; with a bombard tower selected, you can see it's range, voila:



This also introduces the style of the main interface. I have to say style, instead of the main interface, since some of the shortcomings of the interface were found during initial play-testing. Most of the components will remain the same, though. Namely, the 'score', map, and general layout of the interface. Which leaves the dinky Chat box out of the, components without change list.

Officially, it's day 13 of production and I've typed out dozens of pages worth of code. It's playable, but there are matters of balancing the units, and a few more features to add before it's ready for anything public. Tentatively, we're looking at early January, 2009.

(ps: the CSS is Efencea themed, for those that don't notice)