Tower defense game

It's been a bit of time since my last post, mainly because I've been learning a whole new language/framework to program games in. I wanted to try something different after I finished Lacadia in C#, so I had a list of frameworks and engines that I could use and the Love framework for lua was on there. Love is a 2d framework with a bunch of cool,easy to use built in features. There's a particle system, custom shaders, physics, and a bunch more that I haven't even discovered yet!

So my first project using Love was a generic version of Pong, it didn't take very long to get a working version. At the same time, I had watched a video about adding "juicy" effects to your game that wouldn't effect gameplay that much, but make it much more interesting/fun/satisfying. So I began to add some of the things to pong.

1. Particles trail following the ball, it highlights the balls movement, and makes it seem like the ball is really moving
2. Easing on the paddles makes stopping the paddles seem more smooth and fluid. I was surprised at how much of a difference it made when I took it away.
3. Screen shake on hitting the ball as the number of consecutive hits without a score increases. I think this is a cool feature and it makes it the gameplay much more exciting as you hit the ball more and more times
4. Ball hit animation. When the ball hits a paddle, it's radius shrinks and then gets bigger and then eventually settles on the original size. It looks nice and makes hitting the ball feel powerful.
5. Something else to add would be sound, but I didn't feel like hunting around for/making my own sounds

All of this helped me get to know lua and the love framework pretty well.

What I'm working on now is a variant of the Tower Defense (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_defense) game. It's something I wanted to do for a while, just never really got into it. I thought it'd be cool to do a fantasy themed one, but I realized that that's been done a lot and I've done the fantasy theme a lot. So I kept thinking about different ideas and came up with something I like. 

So there are three types of towers: red, green, and blue towers. And there are colored enemies made up of a red,green, and blue component. When the enemy gets in range of a certain color tower, the tower starts to "steal" the enemies color, and when an enemies color gets to black, it dies. So if I have a red tower and a red enemy the enemy will slowly start to lose red color until it gets to black. If i have a red tower and a purple enemy (red and blue), the enemy will lose all of its red color and then end up as blue (I'd need to have a blue tower to kill it). I think this is an interesting idea. You can have different combinations of colors for enemies that actually require strategic placement of the different colored towers.

I also added a pretty cool lighting feature for the towers, which I show off in the video below...
Thanks for reading!