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Tower Defence Game

Areas experimented in:

Level Design

VFX

Asset Importing

Programming

User Interface

This is one of my first projects in Unity and I followed a tutorial made by Brackeys on youtube to create a top-down Tower Defence game. The main goal with this project was to get comfortable with the game engine and to explore different parts of making games to narrow down what I liked and disliked.

Levels

This is the result of the game after following the tutorials and giving it some small personal touches. (Such as fonts and different colors on the turrets and the bullets.) But I felt like I wanted to experiment with the environment more. It felt too clean and boring to look at, especially after hours of working with it.

Normal2.png

After finding some free assets online I created this first map. It was a blast and I wanted to experiment with making the map slightly more difficult by placing assets in places you'd normally want to place turrets in an efficient way, such as in U-turns and the center of the map.

Forest2.png

I was enjoying the first map so much that I wanted to build a second map with a totally different theme. So I went with a desert theme with the intention of making it even more difficult by blocking alot of frequently used squares. This was the result!

Desert2.png

Different angles for comparison.

Here's a short bit of the gameplay. It's a few levels in, and the enemies are of the standard type with normal movement speed and health.

Gameplay1.gif

Another gif showing slow and tough enemies, buying, placing and upgrading turrets.

Gameplay2.gif

Main Menu

To the left is the first version of the main menu. I then gave it to an artist who made a quick overpaint that you can see to the right. I then replicated it inside of Unity and was quite happy with the result!

First version

Overpaint

MainMenugoodie.gif

Final

VFX

I messed around a lot with the particle systems, especially the boss death animation which while I wouldn't normally use, was super fun exaggerating the VFX aspect of it. I wanted to keep the animation mostly to remember the fun I had experimenting around with different values. And honestly, who doesn't mind a bit of an exaggerated explosion in the ending of a level?

Bossdeathlol.gif

Final notes

What I've discovered while working on this project is that I enjoyed the balancing aspects of the game. Just putting objects in different places on the map made the game feel different. Having so much control by tweaking small numbers or placements is fascinating to me. I worked with changing the economy of the game, adjusting the damage output, and different speeds at which turrets can shoot. This was all a blast to do. After a lot of experimenting though, it felt like finding a middle-ground of too easy and too difficult was a challenge. I got help from a few friends playtesting but in hindsight, I felt like I needed it to be tested a lot more.

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