GDC: 2016: Tower Keepers is a deep auto-RPG battling its way to iOS and Android

Tower Keepers is a deep and strategic free to play auto RPG by ninjakiwi that's heading to iOS and Android within the next two months.

If you've played Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes or Dungeon Boss, you pretty much know what to expect here. You'll build a squad of fantasy heroes, equip them with upgradable gear and skills, then throw them into battle against various nasties.

As you can expect, battles are automated but you can tap on a specific enemy to get your units to focus on it and choose when to use their soul skills. These are incredibly powerful abilities that can completely change the course of battle.

You can craft equipment and collect new active and passive skills as loot drops. All of these can be upgraded to increase your stats, which is also achieved by levelling up your heroes.

Heroes also have a star rating, which you can increase by collecting specific items as loot drops. This drastically improves your heroes' soul skills.

Aside from a lengthy story mode which currently includes six campaigns and 80 levels (each of which has three levels of difficulty), there's PvP and daily and monthly challenges.

The PvP involves building your own multi-levelled tower and equipping it with a bunch of different craftable defences, monster units, and heroes. An opponent player will then try to assault your tower and will earn rewards if they successfully take out your defences and reach the top of the tower.

Meanwhile, you and your heroes will earn rewards based on how successfully your tower defends against them. You can also raid enemy towers and earn rewards if you take out their defences.

Then there's the catacombs which provides a daily challenge, and the wizard's tower which provides a monthly one. The catacombs is a raid through a challenging dungeon which rewards you with loot if you manage to make it to the end.

Meanwhile, the wizard's tower is a lot more challenging and can only be completed once daily. Depending on how well you perform, you'll increase in rank and earn huge rewards at the end of the month when it resets.

Tower Keepers is free to play, so you can expect an energy system - though it's pretty innovative. You own a feast hall which constantly provides your heroes with food, which you expend when you enter a level.

You can upgrade this feast hall to produce and store more food, which allows you to achieve much more each day. However, if you don't have much time to play, you can spend all of your food in one fell swoop for massive rewards.

Tower Keepers is all set to launch within the next two months on iOS and Android, and will include 30 heroes to collect and send into battle and more to follow in later updates.