The Firing Line: 5 questions for Superhippo Games on Pirate Legends TD

Pirate Legends TD stands out in the crowded tower defence genre thanks to its playful and detailed visuals, its water-based tactics, and its generally wacky sensibility.

It's the first title from Superhippo Games, and it's a bold and eye-catching debut.

We caught up with the game's designer, Rene Laurent, to find out how an exploding pufferfish is a useful weapon against angry pirates.

Rene Laurent: We took a different approach to the typical tower defence games by focusing on water-based combat instead of the more traditional land-based settings.

This added a new dimension to the gameplay mechanics by enabling us to create an array of aquatic weaponry such as great-white sharks, huge sea monsters, and exploding pufferfish, to name a few.

The water mechanics are quite important to the game, in that rivers can affect the speed of your enemies which requires you to reassess your tactics depending on the direction of flow.

Another great feature of using water for the combat areas was the ability to use a shockwave attack to slow the enemy's progress. An example of this would be firing a broadside from your ship's cannons in front of an enemy which in turn creates shockwaves that pushes them back into range of your towers.

We're huge RTS fans and grew up playing games like Command & Conquer, Warcraft, and Age of Empires, so we really wanted to take some of the depth that you find in that genre and transfer it to mobile without scaring too many of the casual players away.

We liked what was happening on iOS with games like Fieldrunners, Kingdom Rush, iBomber and Jelly Defense, but thought that there was room for something that was a little more visually ambitious.

We also wanted to have more focus and personality on the object you are defending by making it an integral part of the gameplay. This was achieved by using the pirate ship, which acts like a manually controlled master tower, capable of firing in a 360° arc around itself.

One of the main difficulties that sticks out was trying to strike the delicate balance between visual richness and detail, without straying into the realms of confusion that you can get with busy art.

Luckily we have an exceptionally talented art department that understood how to walk the line/plank on this. Although we did have to scrap a few of the more audacious ideas along the way.

The balancing was also a challenge due to some of the more obscure features we've introduced to the gameplay. In some levels you can hire island natives and pirates that will patrol a stretch of water and engage your enemies.

We are definitely a little obsessed with adding charm, personality, and a large dollop of humour to our characters and environments, so you can expect to see much more of that in the future and I think it will become synonymous with our games.

We believe the key to making a successful game is having fun during the process and I think this is reflected heavily in the weird and wonderful characters inhabiting the Pirate Legends world.

I don't want to give too many trade secrets away, but here's a few nuggets to help you get started. As I mentioned above there are always a number of options to send your enemies to a watery grave.

Hiring allies at the start of a level is a nice cheap alternative to building towers, as they can cover a wider area.

It's also important to strike the right balance between Chemical towers that can slow the swarming enemy units and allow the more powerful towers to do added damage.

Finally, using the shockwaves generated by player-activated powers (Turtles & Bombards) is a great way to buy more time and push enemies back into range of your towers.