Indie Game Dev Recycle Bin

The dumping ground of a Game Design student and possibly his (attempt at) art. I have a Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/theduskphantom Twitter: @Theduskphantom

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My Game Design portfolio

I made a semi-competent portfolio page, check it out if interested. It has links to my social media and related stuff

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Laguna

Listen to Laguna by TheDuskPhantom #np on #SoundCloud

New song, kinda jazzy. Used my new bass on it.

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Voyager

Listen to Voyager by TheDuskPhantom #np on #SoundCloud

Another song I recently did. Check it out, motivate me to do more/improve.

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I do some music on the side, hopefully I can get somewhere with it in the future. For now i’m just incorporating it into some of my game design work. Here’s a fairly simple song I did a couple weeks ago.

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Terry’s entry

I’m Terry, and i’m responsible for both the design and art on the game. Initially, I was startled by the fact that our group did not have an artist, and truth be told it did increase the work load significantly for me, but in the end we managed. The core design of the game consisted of three things; Unit stats/balance, Level Design, and the weapons triangle. 

Both unit stats and level design were recorded in the Level Design Document. The way I handled that was, I made an initial map layout with all the units in their spawning tiles, and ballparked the stats they would have. After that, we would piece together the map in unity and begin testing and altering stats and placement as we go, updating the Level design doc when we settled on something that felt balanced.

For the Weapons Triangle, we initially looked at the way Fire Emblem handled it. Fire Emblem gave extra damage and accuracy to the weapon that had advantage, and the opposite to the one that didn’t. We realized that adding extra damage gave units TOO much of an advantage, swaying the course of the battle more than we’d like, so we limited it to just accuracy.

I was also responsible for alot of the production stuff including budget, schedule and competition. The way we worked out budget was interesting, as I was taking on multiple roles. In the end I decided that I would calculate it as if I were multiple people, each taking up a single role.

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Todd’s Post

Todd Hamilton - Programmer

It was my job to create the core elements of gameplay, mainly AI. The first step was making a map creator that can be used from the Unity editor. This involved learning about prefabs and editor scripts.

The next step was creating player movement. I used the Dijkstras path finding algorithm to find a path from the player unit’s current tile to the selected destination tile. I used Linear Interpolation from each tile to move the unit along the path. After creating movement, I quickly implemented attacking enemies (Insta-kill) so I could begin work on the AI.

Each enemy units AI works by getting all the player units it is able to reach and attack. This is done using a fill search to get all units within movement + attacking range. These units are added to a pool where they will be sorted out until one is found which is ideal to attack. The less-ideal units to attack (Due to the weapon triangle) are then removed from the pool of units, followed by the units with highest health. Dijkstras is then performed to find the unit with the shortest path in the pool. This is the unit that will be attacked. If no unit is in range the enemy unit will use Dijkstras to find the closest player unit and will path as far as it can towards it.

Finally I worked on tweaking the AI code such that both melee units and archers (cannot attack from adjacent tile and have a larger attack range) could use the same algorithm. To achieve this, instead of pathing to a player unit, They path to the closest tile where they could still attack the player from. These being: tiles on the same row/column with a x or y difference of no more than “Attack Range”, excluding adjacent tiles for archers only.

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Trying to pre-balance a game

The game i’m designing/doing art for has now reached the point where it is semi-functional and playable. This, along with getting further into level design, means that I at least have to attempt to balance characters before actually testing with them.

In just a few minutes, we’ve had to change so many variables for stats that my original vision for balancing has been proven completely wrong. Moral of the story? Don’t assume you can balance something early into production, extensive testing is essential.

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When the other members of your group aren’t familiar with the genre

Having to explain seemingly simple things over and over again has become the norm lately, as the other members of my group have never played nor seen game play of the genre of game we are making. Important aspects like individual-unit strategy and the importance of stats are a token of the sRPG genre, but having team members who dismiss them as unimportant is frustrating, especially when they aren’t willing to even seek out and study gameplay videos. FeelsBadMan

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Working on a project you think is doomed to fail

Working full time on art and design over a short period of time, especially when i’m not proficient in either, inevitably leads to both of those jobs being done poorly. When you’re doomed to failure (or at least mediocrity) by luck of the draw, or more specifically being basically shoved into a crowd of people and told to socialize and find team members when you’re in a field made up of mostly antisocial people (including yourself) in the first place, leading to missing obvious essential parts of a team, you begin to lose faith in the project since your role becomes extremely stressful thus even further hindering the potential for the project to become successful on any front.

What have I learned from this? Don’t expect things to turn out as they’re explained to you. If people don’t gravitate to you or you’re not extremely sociable/lucky, you’re probably gonna have a tough time getting a group together.

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Clone? Well yeah, but “inspired by” sounds more professional. (Fire Emblem-inspired)

Since my group  consists of two artists and a single designer, we decided that an SRPG would be a fairly programming-intensive (AI, pathing, etc.) and art-minimal (Fire Emblem-esque sprite art) choice. We’ve decided to keep the base foundation of fire emblem, including the rock-paper-scissors interaction between melee weapons and a flat plane, but have decided to add on a small skill-based minigame to try and differentiate ourselves a little from the inspiration (more on that in the future). 

But since we haven’t actually started with production, I’ve decided to try and get a head-start on art. Here’s a sprite: 

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Game Dev Group Project

Over the next (approximately) two months, I along with two Programmers will be attempting to create a game. Here’s the catch: we have no artist. While for me, that means a whole lot more work than I was expecting, but for the onlooker (that means you!), it’s an opportunity to point and laugh at both my horrid art skills and possible mental breakdown from trying to juggle Art, Sound and Game Design while trying to lead a group.

Wish me luck, or don’t, it’s up to you.