ImpractiLauncher (Working Title)

ImpractiLauncher (Working Title, I know it's awful, I'm trying to think of something else) is an experimental Tower Defense game, built to also work as an Android app launcher (home screen).

In this game, your apps are the towers! You can tap on them to launch them just like any other Android launcher, or you can long-tap on them to place them or upgrade them. Each app behaves differently based on it's package name.

This is mainly a prototype at the moment, I'm testing it out to see how fun the idea really is and if people will even like it. So it's far from complete and is likely to be buggy, unbalanced, and not an absolute blast yet.

Preemptive FAQ: So what's the gameplan?

Currently, my goal is to get this to a fully playable, fairly polished prototype. Then, I'll go back to my main project, for a while at least. After that, if there's people interested in this project I will develop it further.

The prototype will stay 100% free. If further development is done, the game will likely stay free-to-play, but I'll look into minor in-app-purchases or a "pro" version.

Won't this be kind of impractical?

Well, yeah, most likely. Hence the working title.

It certainly won't be (and isn't supposed to be) competition to something like Niagara Launcher, (a really good launcher you should check out). In fact, you could say that this is sort of the anti-thesis to something like Niagara:

Does something really need to be simple, clean, and ultra-functional if it's just plain cool?

With that being said, I'm mainly building this for the novelty of it. I don't expect many people will use this as their full-time launcher. In fact, it will still be fully playable without having to set it as your launcher.

Also, I plan to do my best to make it so that this will at least be fully functional (within reason) as a launcher. Balancing gameplay vs. function is part of what makes this interesting as a developer.

Will this just be for Android?

Well, it definitely won't be on iOS if that's what you're asking. You can't even replace your home screen with a normal alternative on iOS, much less one that's also a game. So go ahead, please, explain to me how iOS is the objectively superior platform ;)

However, there may be versions for computers down the line, (perhaps using files as towers instead of "apps"), but that's not currently a priority.

Wait... How'd you make a game an Android launcher?

I had to develop a custom Android plugin for Godot! In fact, I'm considering making this plugin open source. I'd love to see other games as app launchers, so stay tuned if your interested in that.