Alien Tower Defense
Tools
Unity 3D
C#
FMOD
PRO TOOLS
BLENDER
PHOTOSHOP
Plastic SCM
Contributions
Game DIrection
Game System Design
Programming
Sound Design
Environment Design
UI and UX elements
Shaders and VFX
Balancing and Testing
Alien Tower Defense is a real-time tower defense strategy game which was completed during spring semester 2023 alongside 2 of my peers. Development on this project was a ton of fun and a good challenge to get all of the moving pieces working in tandem. There are a host of different systems at play here: Resource Economies, Enemy Wave System, Enemy Navigation, Power, Cursor Placement and Inspection, Dynamic Vision Cones, Target Tracking, Weapon Systems, Damage Types, etc.
Environment Design
Environments started as simple sketches in a notebook. Being a strategy game, I wanted to focus on the flow of traffic and chokepoints to create tension and open up viable strategies based on weapon type. With weapons having defined angles of attack, the player needs to have some idea of where enemies will storm. Ramps, walls, and funnels help facilitate this. Visually, I stumbled into this idea of creating contained cube worlds, with inverted skyboxes. Rendering an expansive world out-of-bounds was needlessly expensive in time and resources, and this also gave the game a cool thumbprint, albeit heavily inspired by the excellent game, Into The Breach.
Shaders and VFX
Shaders and VFX were largely created from scratch with Unity’s Shadergraph and VFX graph. With these tools, I was able to create the electric leash for powered units, placement holograms, vision cones, resource particles, and ground textures.
Game Systems
Creating the interwoven game systems was a satisfying challenge. The player and enemy economies respond when units are created and destroyed. Vision cones are shaped dynamically based on other player units in the field of view. The power system redistributes power to keep defenses online, and to reclaim power when they are destroyed. Each of these systems work in tandem and respond to each other as events take place.
Programming
Programming the game systems required the use of a few different resource pools. An abstract Resource class was written, and then derived from to create currency, health, power, etc. Additionally, events needed to be created to alert units to changes in a particular resource pool, so that they could respond as needed. For example, when a unit’s health pool is depleted, a death event is invoked, and any listeners will be alerted so that they can respond accordingly.
- If the unit was powered, then it is disconnected from the power grid, and its power consumption is restored to the related power supply.
- If the unit is mobile, it’s current navigation coroutine instruction is stopped.
- Currency is awarded to the player/enemy who destroyed the unit.
- The unit is removed from the list of targetable units, and the model is replaced with a ragdoll for some time, before destroying the game object.
- Endgame conditions are checked.