After a lot of experimenting and rewriting scripts to be more efficient I can proudly say this is my first completed Unity project. The art, the mechanics and the coding is something I've paid some good time on and it shows in the user-friendliness of making a level. Adding a completely new wave is just a mather of adding a line of numerics which indicate the sequence in which the enemies will spawn. If I want to add a new unit or enemy I simply have to drag in the sprites and done. That's it! The clever coding does all of the work. Our task was to create a dynamic game with the following features/points implemented:
In the end I went with a 2D Tower Defence kind of game where waves of enemies are trying to destroy the player's base. One of the challenges with this was how the combat between the player's units and the enemies would work. Should the enemies stand in a queue attacking a player unit until it's defeated and then move on- or should they trade hits once and then move on. After trial and error the latter appeared to be the most fun and open for more tactics as to how to place your units. Read more about the implementing of the required features and a link to the game itself after the break. Or click on the link below to play the game Our Tavern! right away. Play Our Tavern! The two distinctive gameplay phases were easy to determine; trading and combat. At first the player is given all the time to think of their positioning for the coming wave of enemies, as long as the player can afford to send out any of the units. Once the player is satisfied with their set up and hits the spacebar the horde starts to march towards the tavern (the player's base) to destroy it. The two phases differ from eachother in that the player has no control over the combat phase but has all control over the trading phase. Any reasoning or story behind the phases is for the player to decide. But the big plot surrounding it all is merely that the evil horde of skeletons, orcs and dark knights want a drink of mead from the tavern but are not allowed to enter thus decide to destroy it with the tavern and all. Mobilising all units to protect the mead should be reasoning enough to fight off evil. On of the big things when making a game which core mechanic is based around fending off waves of enemies is balancing. A balanced game is a fair game (though we all have to admit being overpowered isn't so bad from time to time). Balancing a game, however, isn't as easy as it sounds. Unit's power and health should be logical and make sense for the price they cost. Enemies have to deal a fair amount of damage, but they should not turn into devastating bulletsponges. The way I've programmed the creation and sequences of waves came in really handy on that account as I could tweak every bit of health or power an enemy has, which enemy spawns when and how many spawn in a round. To stay consistent in the waves I made the waves according to the following progression:
In short, I put a lot of time into getting a fair learning curve into the game. In the first wave giving the player only 1 option to build to give them a sense of how things work while, in this round, it is impossible to lose anything. The player loses one unit, but the round's reward immediately pays that back. The round right after leaves the player's choice open as to how to build, after having learned how the game works and how the first enemy works. The last requirement was to implement a key and lock mechanism. Which is nothing more than some sort of item is needed to traverse some obstacle. Just like how a key would be the item to go through a door. However, to make something of this nature in the gameplay I designed would be rather tough. Taking away the progression of the player because they miss an item is not something that fits into this type of gameplay. To make up for this I made the lock part of the key and lock mechanism something optional. At random the enemy units drop a bag of gold containing a random amount of money (not quite random as it takes the current round and enemy which dropped in into account) on the ground. In the trading phase the player has the option to send out the Merchant unit for 100 who will pickup any of the gold bags on the ground. Though is does not neccesarily makes the progress more clear, it definitely can help the player if they realise they can get more money than that they would spend on the Merchant.
All in all this is one of my games I'm definitely most proud of and I think I might continue working on it even after the assignment. Click below to play Our Tavern! Play Our Tavern! The controls are illustrated in-game but for good measure I'll write down the controls below aswell:
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