Outside the Box Project Alpha Work - Game Scene Variation/Development

In the very early prototype stages I was attempting to figure out the camera angle, perspective and positioning of the defences, player base and the overall game board the player would interact with.

The initial concept was to take influence from The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds. In that game the camera is positioned top-down but the characters and environment are 3D models. To allow the player to be able to distinguish silhouettes in A Link Between Worlds the designers decided to tilt all the models 45 degrees back, that way the player would be able to see all the characters and creatures whilst keeping the top-down perspective. My early attempt is visible in Figure 1.

Figure 0.1.

Figure 0.2.

Figure 0.3.

Prior to the start of term I made a head start on developing mechanics for our game, simply purchasing defences, upgrades and having the upgrades be represented by larger cubes; all of which deducting cost. I also wanted to add some cheat codes to the game and I made a script that would give the player money if they typed MONEY on the keyboard with breaking the string and hitting enter. It was buggy and didn't give the player the intended amount, but the proof of concept was starting to emerge through Figure's 0.1, 2 and 3.

Figure 1.

Figure 1. depicts a very early prototype of the upgrade system for the towers in the game, the spheres inside the cubes are the spawn locations and when clicked on a defence ( in this instance, a tower) will spawn in their position whilst also deducting gold from the player's supply contextually to the level of the defences being built: 

Level 01 - 100 Gold
Level 02 - 200 Gold
Level 03 - 300 Gold

These prices are simply for testing purposes and shall be adjusted later on for game balance.

Figure 2.

It was decided that the initial Legend of Zelda inspired view wouldn't work for our Tower Defence game, as the viewpoint gave us too little room to produce both complicated paths and impressive defence models.

Instead our next scene design was inspired by a game of Minecraft, were Chess and I built a mock-up in Minecraft and played with where the camera could sit (using the camera of the player in Minecraft). Figure 2. was what we came up with and I followed it by implementing that view point in our, then, current Unity Project; Figure 3.

Figure 3.

At the time we felt that this was a decent viewpoint for our game as it afforded us the faults of our last scene's perspective. We could accommodate the much needed long path for game balancing and more impressive defences. The reason for this desire to have impressive defences is because the visual spectacle of creating a large defence, then upgrading to a bigger and more powerful version, alongside sounds etc. is great for player feedback; the goal is to make the player feel powerful when building defences.

Figure 4.

The next challenge, as shown in Figure 4. was the distribution of UI, and where and how exactly the player health should be represented. Our initial idea was to make the player's health diagetic (an experience contextual to the medium), in this case, it was planned to be flags that the enemies were trying to steal from the player. The player would lose a flag when the enemies reach the player's base. 

This idea was scrapped due to a clustering of the player's view point, however, if we had continued this we could have done something interesting where the player loses a flag when the enemy reaches the base. But then the player would have the opportunity to claim it back by killing an enemy "returning" to the forest with the flag, and should the player manage to kill the returning enemy, they would be able to collect the flag from the board; restoring it to the player's base.

Figure 5.

Figures 5 & 6 show a minor adjustment to the scene, where I played with the lighting in the scene to add fog depth to the camera and colour to the main light in the scene, both to help portray tone and to make the scene more visually appealing. The desired tone was that of warmth, energy and fun. And from the perspective of a child the late evening sunset shades would normally be a welcoming, nostalgic and fun environment as that would normally be the time of day where one would have finished school and would then go home to play, either indoors or outside.

Figure 6.

Figure 7.

Figure 7. is the result of me re-building the project from scratch, as I had just fixed the coding trouble for building defences with Ibby, our technician at the time, and our older project file had become cluttered and confusing. This also gave me an opportunity to reinforce what I had coded for myself and to start implementing the finalised models I had made. At this time the only temporary model in the game was that of the enemies, which were just a bog standard cut out of a humanoid figure.

Figure 8.

Figure 9.

Figure's 8 and 9. represent the game as it was when we conducted our Milestone presentation to our class, tutor's and industry professional Steve Goss for feedback and progress report.

Figure 10.

After a team meeting where in Chess and I brainstormed directions we could take our game after hearing feedback from Supermassive's Director of Design Steve Goss and our course leader Andy Bossom. We made 4 concepts between us on a sheet of paper (Figure 10.) and I went away and built an alpha version of the top 3 maps sketches.

Figure 11.

Figure 12.

The purpose of Figure 12. & 13.'s version of the game is to defend your outposts from spawning enemy waves. Should your outposts be destroyed (life represented through red boxes currently) then the enemies will begin to attack your home base.

For future development we hope to make this into a control the board game type, where enemies don't destroy the outposts, as they do currently, but instead take control of them and will later on be able to take control of your defences, you as the player would defend your outposts and try to reclaim any lost outposts. After a certain number of waves and the board hasn't been taken by the monsters, The Monarch would appear as a boss to fight off to win the round.
This returns us to our One sheet and Game design document roots of the story of our game, where The Monsters are invading and you must defend your land. This switch also allows us to retain our games status as a Tower Defence game but also provides us greater freedom to play with mechanics and strategy, such as AoE (Area of Effect) attacks and the, previously mentioned, bubble wrap to slow down The Monsters.

Figure 13.

Figure 14.

Finally for the Alpha submission the last variant I pieced together was suggested to us by our tutors and Steve Goss and concept made in Figure 10.
The variant is Plants vs Zombies inspired. However, we never took this forward and was more of a proof of concept that we listened to the provided feedback and acted on it. None of the members of the team (myself included) had any interest in making, what we felt to be, a Plants vs Zombies clone.