Celestial Clash Tower Defense
Overview
This game was create as a group project in my second year at university. The team chose to create a tower defence game and everyone split into different teams of their expertise with different leads for each area. There was myself and one other member with the roles of technical implementation so we split the work load 50/50. We delegated the world to the person it made sense to give it to, whether they had less work to do or they were currently working on mechanics with the closest relationship to the new task.
AI
This project was my first time working with AI in unreal engine 4. Therefore, I started out by learning the fundamentals of AI within unreal along with drawing out the different actions and tasks the AI would have along with which ones were more important than others. Due to the 6 week time limit for this project the AI was very simple with 3 different actions that could be taken from Moving to an objective, attacking a player or attacking the objective. Alongside this they needed conditions for state changes as well. The same AI was used across all enemy types and the only difference were some variables and the enemy attack meaning different AI never needed to be developed for other enemies. Along with the AI they needed a spawning system which I broke down into all it’s different sections making it easy for designers to use and balance as well using Enumerations and integers in editable arrays placed in an actor in the level.
UI
With my main roles being focused on the enemies and AI I was given some other tasks as well like the UI and HUD while the other developed created the main character and all the mechanics attached to them. I created the main menu and pause menu. I created all the functionality for the HUD to allow the UI designer to easily apply their work to a working place holder HUD. Then I also created some spacial UI for character health bars and numbers along with portal enemy lists to show the player what enemies are coming from that portal.
Pickups
The player needed some way to regain health and mana when they were playing through waves. Therefore the solution was health and mana pickups which would be rechargeable similar to the health packs in overwatch. this would allow them to continue playing the game or heal between or in the middle of rounds to not doom them when taking damage.
