Macro Defence is a tower defence game on iOS made by Bournemouth based James Rosenberg, it’s out now and the base game is available for free with a £2.99 upgrade for the level editor. I spoke to James recently
So, when you started working on Macro Defence did you have a blueprint in mind for how the strategy element might play out?
No, no at all. So my original concept was very different from this. I originally was going to do a themed tower defence game where you were preventing viruses from entering your iPad. So I kind of build it so that you were looking through the screen into the internal components of the iPad.
How many levels are in the full game?
There are 6 that I provide, and then the level creator lets you create as many as you like.
It’s a very basic game, I imagine you’re looking at the commuter crowd?
Yeah, because my background is in design and user experience I’m looking to try and make a simple interface, simple design. You know, no complicated graphics coming up in your face all the time. I wanted it to be a more tranquil experience.
How many different towers in the game?
There are only three, I wanted to be sure there weren’t too many available as most players won’t be familiar with tower defence.
There aren’t that many tower defence games on iOS?
No, there are a few but the thing is they don’t work that well on the iPhone. The screen is so small, and you really need a good hit area so that you can interact with things clearly. A lot of them use scrolling to get around that issue but then you have to manage between scrolling and hit, which can be quite confusing, which is why I made this iPad only. To give you a more reasonable control system.
You don’t want people to pick this up and not have a good time with it. I try games on my iPhone myself and even with titles like Angry Birds and Infinity Blade, I can’t get on with them. They’re not well designed for that screen.
It’s difficult, the new iPhones have a little more space but it’s still a different aspect ratio, I would have to redesign the entire game to account for it. Which is something I might consider if this version does well.
Is there any way to access levels that other people have made?
You can’t at the moment but my feeling is that that will be my next step. There’s a few things that I want to do like create a marketplace where people can put their levels up and improve on the towers.
That’s really the bread and butter of the game, you want people to be drawn in by a potentially unlimited number of user made levels.
Yeah, and the way that I’ve made them it would actually be quite easy to share them. The amount of data is very small, it’s really just an array of points that says whether it’s a path or not and then the game takes that information and procedurally generates the waves. It probably is possible to get that done but it would have taken more time and I wanted to release to see if there was any interest in it.
And the towers?
It would be a nice aspect of gameplay if you could upgrade the towers as you went along. I’d like to include that too.