Team, Prototyping and Plans for the future!

 Game Overview

I started about 5 days ago with an idea for a game that could be unique compared to other tower defence games. Being inspired by Moba games and old RTS games mostly the idea sprung to mind. A top down fantasy four player defence game. You have to defend against the hordes and masses of enemies that spawn behind gates. Inside the game you have different timers. One is Downtime which in this period you can Build/Construct structures or Explore the map to capture objectives/kill neutral camps while you wait for the next wave to spawn. The other timer that persists is objective timers. Objective timers are capturing monumental areas to receive extra bonuses/privileges for your team and you can only capture these when they are available. Monumental areas are very important for your team. The types of bonuses they can grant are Resource bonuses, Defence bonuses and Military bonuses. 

Building/Constructing comes from gathering resources which will be available across the map. There will be random spawns for these similar to Age of Empires. The gathering process is done by Builders. On the start of the game you are granted your hero of choice and one builder. Builders are very important they gather resources for you to Build your defences. You should try to keep your builder alive at the start because if you don't have the builder you can't get the resource to get more of them. The resources available are Wood, Stone, Gems and Gold. All of these except gold can be gathered. Gold can only be collected upon killing enemies. That brings me toward another important feature called Favour. When you kill enemies you are granted favour, you will usually need favour to upgrade buildings such as Towers and Catapults. Upgrading these types of buildings can grant them special powers like Poison arrows or Icy projectiles. With this said to keep the game balanced each player will be allocated equal territory to Build/Construct upon.

For the moment the story is a bit vague. In the past I've spent a bit too long on the Game design document/concept pages and it pushed me away from doing what I love more which is Game development. 

The base story is that you are The Guardians of Gahya a Tree of Life which if destroyed darkness will over shadow the light in the world. Evil foes want to kill Gahya to rule the world and you have to stop them. You play the 'Hero' all with their own reasons to protect the Tree of Life.

Current Team

Daniel Paine - Project Lead/Game Designer

Severi Kasurinen - Programmer/Blueprint Scripter

David Alexandru - Character Artist

Prototyping Begins!

I decided first to make this game in Unreal 4 because I have had much more success with it. I've made two successful game jams with it and am pleased with the engine as a whole. After deciding on the engine I needed to learn a few things, these were importing animations/skeletons into UE4 as I was never tasked with this before. The process was really simple and using animations/autorig skeleton from mixamo was a huge help. My hope is to make our own characters and use mixamo for prototyping and look for less generic animations later on with a help of a talented animator. 

With some blueprinting experience in the past I was able to make the tower shoot a projectile at my character and got the enemies to follow me around the map. Even know I was having fun with blueprinting I was very limited to what I could do with my experience. I was fortunate to have a great programmer contact which kindly decided to help with my project even know he had no experience with UE4 he quickly grasped the Blueprinting system I was working with and made some awesome functions. Some of which we have done so far are:

- Fleshed out the base level/boundaries

- Created 3 out of 4 of the monumental areas on the map
- Added Player and AI animations/controls
- Added Player and AI health/damage

- Added AI objective and player aggro radius

- Added AI spread when attacking
- Tower shoots projectiles at the player with aggro radius

Here's a video of what we have right now.

Screenshot of the Overview of the game. 

Farewell, for now.

I hope you guys liked the first post, I'm hoping to make much more when we have more to show. In the next post there should be some information/media of the character development and more game development in general. Thanks for reading!