I’ve just graduated from my course in game art, and I decided I wanted to do something with all my free time I have now, so I decided I wanted to make another game in UE4. Looking back to when I was a wee lad, I chose a map for Warcraft 3 that I wanted to try to do. So what is this game? The development title I’ve chosen is exactly the same as the game I’m trying to remake; Gem TD.
Like any Tower Defense games, you have waves of enemies spawning, and you have to kill them with your towers. What makes Gem TD different, however, is the gems. Instead of building towers, you get five gems to plop out in the world per round, and each one you place out becomes one out of eight gems:
- Amethyst
- Aquamarine
- Diamond
- Emerald
- Opal
- Ruby
- Sapphire
- Topaz
When they are spawned the gems get assigned a ‘rank’, ranging from chipped to perfect which depends on the level of your home base. The higher the rank, the more damage, attack speed, area of effect, etc they have. After placing five of them, you get to choose one of them to be powered. The rest becomes inactive blockers and act as the walls for your maze. If you were lucky and got two of the same type and rank (i.e., two chipped rubies), you can choose to ‘combine’ them into one higher rank gem. The other ruby becomes a wall, and the upgraded one becomes a flawed ruby. Queue the wave of enemies and with the powered gem you easily defeat the first wave. The enemies walk between waypoints on the ground, and you cannot build on them so you will have to build your maze around them.
I’ve started streaming my project and I’m going to try regularly stream my progress! You can ask me anything in this thread, tweet at me at
Thanks for reading!