Port Defense

Overview
This is probably one of my best completed projects I have done. It was for our CS 3505 final, in a group of 4, which I was team leader. The development process was the Agile process, which we used Scrum to keep ourselves on track. The entire game's development took a little over 3 weeks.

Game Description
The idea spawned from other Tower Defense games which I had been playing a lot at the time. I pitched the idea to the team and they all liked it so we started coming up with ideas, which we started with theme. We landed on a Pirate theme, which meant it would have to be in water. These allowed us to stem all our other ideas, such as boat types, path development, and a gameplay structure.

Here's the skimmy on the ironed out idea:
A tower defense game where the player has the ability of building fleets of ships to protect their city port from the enemy pirates. The player has 6 different ships in their arsenal with differing rankings on fire rate, health, range, attack power, and stengths and weaknesses against enemy ships. The player's responsibility is to strategically decide on locations for their ships that will do the best at protecting their port.

What makes it different?

This almost sounds like it came straight from a Tower Defense template, but we did add some pretty remarkable features that help stand out. The biggest game changer we added was the ability for the enemy to attack your ships, which means you have to pay attention to how well your ships are doing, and replacing any that get destroyed. The player must think about organization of their fleets if they want to be successful. The complexity adds a lot of opportunity for different strategies which is exactly what we wanted.

The second game changer that we added was the ability for real-time special attacks, which included:
* Artillery - Attack that hits a large area, and does a pretty good amount of damage
* Napalm - Attack that repeatedly damages the ships hit by it(limited by time). This has a small area of attack, but does a lot of damage.
* Cleansing - Heals a large amount of your ships 100% or until the special wears off

These attacks could only be initiated during a wave attack. This usually leads it to be a "last resort" type of attack.

Couple Special Mentions

When we were showing the game off, I was approached by a local game developer who said that he was extremely impressed with the amount of balancing that went in the game, especially in only 3 weeks. I was actually very glad he had mentioned this, because we literally spent about half the time testing to make sure nothing was going to dominate throughout the whole game. For example, the Carrier is the strongest ship in the game, but because of its weaknesses to certain ships, it actually can die pretty easy, especially in the last waves. Having a whole map of them would inevitably end up dooming your chances of winning.

Videos

This is an old video...I will try to get something a bit more recent up as soon as I can get a hold of some worthy recording software.

Screens

Title Screen


Napalm Special Attack


Artillery Special Attack


Small Battle


Epic Battle at Wave 11:


Aftermath after Wave 11's Battle:

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