Tower Defense
Details
Tower Defense is a nameless prototype that is a basic idea for a tower defense game. Survive 3 waves and upgrade your turret towers along the way.
Features to note:
- Unique Enemy AI
- Changes target based on damage taken, and some aspects of randomness
- Pathfinding
- Point-Based Randomized Enemy Wave Spawning
- Automated Enemy Targeting
- Tower Upgrading
Reflection
A team that started out as five members dwindled down to two almost immediately, and then completely abandoned shortly after. This project started as a single turret shooting blocks that spawned in a circle, with one singular gear 3d model. The road that it took to get to the point it is in now was essentially building something from scratch.
Developed in unity, this project's challenges started with the enemy AI. It could've just been left as a simple path-finding algorithm towards the center tower with no reaction. This would be boring and give the game no depth. Instead, it was brainstormed that the enemy would change targets once the turrets hurt them enough. There is also a random element added in there that decides to randomly target a tower to add some variety and unpredictability.
From there came the tower's AI. It targets the enemy within it's range that is nearest to the center or itself. The health and damage is upgraded as it levels up. The initial issue is that if the turret broke, you'd have to fix it. If you had no points then it would be broken forever. With having a set number of points per round, you could end up with all broken turrets and no points to fix them. This was fixed in two ways. The turret auto-repairs after a few seconds, and the player can click to hurt enemies. This allows for more agency and choice in gameplay style.
This game went from a simple mechanic test to an actual playable game. That's quite the improvement. While the game is not hard, it is balanced so that you can't win unless you are doing something. It's the start of something that could be expanded further.
