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The CG Cookie Crew is proud to present our tower defense game, PORTALETHIUM! Gridlocked at the intersection of two worlds, you - the valiant forces of blue - must protect your portal against the evil forces of orange.Â
To save your portal is to save your planet!
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 One Game, Two Purposes
We built PORTALETHIUM to be played.
 
Please play it and enjoy it! It’s an endless-style game that we hope will supply you with hours of beat-your-high-score incentive.The Goal?  Simple. You’re on the defense. Prevent enemies from making it to your portal for as long as you possible can.How?  This part is simple in concept but tricky to perfect.Â
You have an arsenal of 3 TURRETS to ward off your enemy:
Canon : As a base turret, this weapon fires a slow-but-steady round at short-range enemies. It may not seem like much, but it can save your bacon when you don’t have many credits to spend.
Gatling : This weapon has a bigger range than the canon and a higher rate of fire. But those enhancements come at a higher cost of your credits.
Missile Launcher : She’s the most expensive turret with the biggest range and firepower. But the catch is she only fires flying drones, not land enemies. Â
KNOW YOUR ENEMY!
3 different enemy types are constantly making a break for your portal:
Moto: These two-wheeled blue buggers are your fastest enemy. Yet they are also your weakest foe. You'll have to act quickly to take down them down, but you won't need much firepower to do so.
Tank: These green juggernauts are the slowest of the enemy hoard. But what they lack in speed they make up for in armor. You'll need plenty of time, cannons, and gatlings to ward off tanks.
Drone: What's that in the sky? It's a bird it's a plane it's a...cliché example! The purple drones are the only airborne enemy and thus can only be engaged by your missile launchers. It can be easy to forget to look in the sky but, for the love of your home planet, don't! Lest the drones quietly rob you of victory.
We also built PORTALETHIUM to teach.
We thought it would be really cool to build a fully playable game and then turn around and teach how to make it! The “Creating a Tower Defense Game” Learning Flow will teach you how to build your own game from the ground up.
- Building assets with Blender : Game assets don’t grow on trees. Someone has to build them. Why not you?! In this 20-lesson course I will teach you all the ins-and-outs of modeling and texturing modular assets for exporting to Unity.
- Level design in Unity : In this course, Jonathan Lampel gives a crash course in using your modular Blender assets to build a playable level inside Unity.
- Game development with Unity : Finally, Jonathan Gonzalez takes all the ingredients of this tower defense recipe and turns it into a playable game!
All 3 courses are available in the "Creating a Tower Defense Game" Learning Flow. Check it out HERE!
All said and done, this has been a huge team effort to make Portalethium a fun, educational reality. We’re talking 1 fully-playable game, 1 Learning Flow, 3 courses, 56 video lessons. It’s a big experience and we're eager for you to be a part of it!
That's a good suggestion. During testing we lengthened the pre-enemy-spawn time to help with this, combined with the slow normal gameplay speed we thought it would be enough time to comprehend the map. But perhaps we didn't solve that.
We’d like to iterate the game with improvement and release a little down the road. Thanks for playing!
We experience the same kind of "gameplay narrative" during testing where the first several levels are exciting and requiring of attention, then the middle-bulk is kinda boring just being able to watch the action take place, and the end is swift with nothing that can really be done.
And that's where we decided to add turret swap/recycling and the obstacles. Though it seems that wasn't a complete solution. We'd like to iterate the game with improvement and release a little down the road. Thanks for playing!
Thanks so much, David! This is exactly what I hoped to hear. Makes it totally worth the effort.
Yes I do: Full Spectrum Series Production flow, for time constraints create a 15 minute Pilot Episode Project using Blender and Photoshop.
I feel like you should have some time to look at the map and strategize before it starts throwing bad guys at you. I've played a lot of tower defense but this just caught me totally off guard.
Man, this game's addictive! Thanks CGC for helping me waste a whole 2 hours today! Felt like trying to stop popping bubble wrap once you've started...virtually IMPOSSIBLE! Very well done time-kill game :)
That's a cool suggestion, adding th + symbol to denote upgrade.
91,
but the last 50 levels or so were a bit boring, because all guns are already placed. and i`m curious why is there a credit limit of 15000?
some cannons definitely stop firing/refuse to fire. Also even at this early stage I would make each tower infinitely upgradable, just increase its fire power per level. You could put a [+] button appear on top of it when you hover over it. You could also use a lighting effect on enemies that effectively changes their colour depending on their hp/defence. That way the "look" of an enemy also scales infinitely with the rest of the game. That was a lot of fun, at first I thought there was no way I would get to level 26 after an hour or so.
"canon" should be "cannon". (I'm a total spelling wonk, and "canon" is a different word.)