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WARNING: THIS IS GOING TO BE A LARGE POST

So I've been thinking, and I may have come up with some ways to integrate RPG elements into a Tower defense game. First of all to do this, you need to have a good story. Maybe get together with a couple friends and start brainstorming, or if you're willing to, come to the forums (like you have kcaz) and seriously bring up what you're trying to do and the direction you want to take. But I insist, a good story is A MUST. It's the reason people keep playing many shooter sequels or trilogies, and it's also the reason top shooters and rpgs are rated as such. A good story will drive people to come back and play.

Secondly, it's time to bring in the elements of a good RPG. What are these elements?

1) Some form of leveling up/gaining experience system
2) Quests/missions that progress the story
3) A method of combat, where you gain experience/points/etc

That's pretty much it. If you look at all RPGs, you will see across the board, every single one has some form of these three elements. Now let's break it down. So you have your awesome storyline, which is broken into sections, chapters, or whatever you want to call them. Now, these sections can be further separated into "Quests or missions" resulting in actually levels of gameplay, or they could be broken down even further, into acts and whatnot, but that depends on the complexity of your storyline. For the sake of simplicity (since this is a flash game and not a 4 disc DVD RPG), we'll go with the Chapters -> Missions structure for the story.

Let's see, I'm going to draw the outline for a quick story so that the structure of your tower defense game (no, I haven't forgotten it's a tower defense game) will flow better.

Genre: space-age future
Location: different human and alien bases around the galaxy
Enemy: some alien lifeform
Plotline: Humans are under attack from some alien lifeform. You play as character(s), and you know nothing about these alien lifeforms. But as you keep playing you realize they have weaknesses. Further on in the story, you get to play as other characters, which progresses the story even further. Eventually, the humans push into the alien bases. Keep in mind throughout the story more weapons are being unlocked (more about this later). As you push into alien territory, you finally find a alien boss. After he is destroyed, you realize that the fight just begun (OH that sounds familiar, haha).

Anyway, so that's the storyline I"ll be working with. So here goes, I'll be talking about 1) the experience system and 2) the method of combat, starting with the latter. First of all, you will start the game playing as 1 character, BOB for instance, and there will be a little tutorial. Since the game will be a tower defense style game, that will be the method of combat. What will be different though, is the weapons (towers) and enemies. There will be both air and ground enemies, some with shields, other with none. The real twist is that, as opposed to just making towers and defending something, the enemies will be able to ATTACK your towers, putting the player on the defense as well. As far as the towers go, there will be a general one (attacks all enemies), land only, air only, and super effective against shield. I think I'll just stick to these 3 towers for now. Now for the experience system. Your character(s) will have the generic RPG metrics (vitality, intelligence, strength, etc), but the uses will be different. Obviously, vitality will have a direct effect on the HP per tower and strength will effect tower damage. Now intelligence will have an effect on your Research & Development of new weapons. These new weapons can be upgrades for the towers or can be completely new towers. Whew! So now you know the key difference, the player's towers can be damaged as well (thus employing elements of a strategy game). As far as the "enemies walking down a path", you can keep that. The addition that I would add is that on "important" missions, there's a twist in the story, and the path is changed or a path is even added (increasing the difficulty mid-level).

So, I'm gonna try to tie all of this together. You start the game playing as BOB, a human that is part of FactionX. You learn the basics of the game. Building towers that attack land (and eventually air) units, and you're introduced into R&D. For the R&D aspect, every enemy you kill give you resources. These resources can be used to build more towers, upgrade towers, or research new towers. Enemies enter their path(s) in realtime, much like in GemCraft, but unlike GemCraft, each "wave" doesn't have the same amount of time. Harder waves are given more time. This is done to give the player time to plan and build new towers, distribute attribute points, and whatnot. So after you learn the basics, the story progresses, and you meet SAM from FactionY. SAM introduces new towers and new enemies to the game (let's say the "shield" ability for enemies and towers that are effective against shielded enemies). Now you switch stories between BOB and SAM, until their storylines collide. Now you play as both BOB and SAM, and FactionX and FactionY are working together (so you can build almost anything, and you garner more resources per kill, etc) and now you push into alien territory and towards the end of the game.

Whew! I put most of my ideas on paper, but feel free to ask any questions about any part that's hazy and I'll gladly explain. Finally, if there are any programmers or groups of programmers that want to collaborate and work on a project like this feel free to contact me. I know kcaz started this thread asking about reinventing the tower defense style to game, and I've provided my ideas here. If you like them, and would like suggestions on ANY genre of gaming, feel free to contact me. Conversely, depending on how people respond to this post, I may be willing to share more ideas (and I have tons) with game developers here. I hope to all it was a good read.

Disclaimer: 1) Typed once and proofread once so I'm sorry for typos and grammatical errors. The forum needs an edit function. 2) All ideas here belong to me (sorry guys), so please don't STEAL anything. Thanks!