| Minions | |
|---|---|
| Developer(s) | Paul Preece, David Scott |
| Platform(s) | Adobe Flash |
| Release | 2008 |
| Genre(s) | Strategy video games |
| Mode(s) | Multi-player |
Minions is a free Flash-based browser game created by Paul Preece and David Scott, who are the founders of the Casual Collective and developers of Desktop Tower Defense and Flash Element TD, respectively. The game has been featured by gaming reviewer The Escapist[1] for winning an award at the Game Developer's Conference in San Francisco.[2] As of 2011, the game has been played millions of times at Kongregate.com[3] It is based on the Warcraft III mod Defense of the Ancients.[4]
Minions is played by two teams of one to six players. In the initial phase of the game each player selects or is randomly assigned one of eight "minions" to play as, each with its own strengths and weaknesses. Two of these minions require the purchase of a "Bonus Pack" to be selected.
Settings are customizable, including the number of players, and manual or automatic minion selection.
After minion selection, players advance with the goal of destroying enemy minions and towers. The field is two dimensional, and scrolled vertically, with the two teams spawning in bases at opposite sides of the map. A team is victorious when it destroys the tower at the heart of the enemy's base.
Minions "level up" by accumulating experience points, increasing their endurance and the amount of damage they inflict. Leveling up also allows a player to upgrade one of his minion's special abilities.
The accumulation of experience points occurs as long as a player's minion is alive. Attacking an enemy minion or tower causes players to gain experience faster.
When a player's minion has been destroyed, it respawns in its base as a "ghost," which, while it can move normally, cannot attack or be attacked. The ghost will turn into a normal minion after an amount of time varies directly with the minion's level.
At the end of the game, players are ranked and awarded points based on the number of experience points he accumulated, the number of enemy minions he destroyed, and the amount of damage he did to towers. Players on the winning team are awarded an additional 100 points.
Minions underwent beta testing during the later part of 2008. In terms of graphics and gameplay, the beta version of Minions was quite different from post-release Minions.[5] Towards the end of 2008, it was released along with the Casual Collective website, as one of the featured games. It was, and still is, by far the most popular game on the Casual Collective website,[citation needed] having been played millions of times, and is also a top rated game on various other websites such as Kongregate, where it attained a 4.26/5 rating.[3]