For the first year major project at AIE I worked together with Artists, Designers and other Programmers to make a prototype game, according to a set brief, over a period of eight weeks. The prototype was required to be a local two-player, turn-based strategy game with a minimum of three unique units, fog of war and the objective must be to protected the 'king'.
The game is a hot-seat multi-player, turn based strategy game, of cat and mouse, set in a world of magical creatures. Player 1 controls the king who must escape Player 2, a monster who can create obstacles to block the King’s path. Player 1 controls the king and must navigate the terrain and use their summonable units to counteract obstacles. Player 2 needs to stop the king from reaching their goal by summoning disasters to block their way.
The fog-of-war was required to conceal tiles for Player 1, but not for Player 2 and so my solution was to simply assign the hidden tiles to a separate layer which the first player's camera does not see. For increased visual effect, when Player 1 does reveal a tile it float up from beneath the map then acts with some buoyancy until it settles. To create this effect I simply used a sin function with decreasing effect over time.
The map for the game was required to be relatively large and with various types of terrain needing to be traversed. As there was a limited amount of time for the project to be completed, I decided to attempt creating a psudeo-random map generator to allow for increased re-playability. The generator uses a clumping method for generating mountains. Randomly picking a spot on the map then randomly picking a neighbour of one of the mountains already in that clump and then repeating as many times as desired. Variables such as the number of mountain clumps, the size of the clumps and how drawn out a clump is, were all made public and modifiable for the designers. The river generation consisted of picking a random point on the edge of the map, but not around a corner, then using a modified wander steering behaviour to move the river in an approximate 'forward' direction, with also a random chance of creating a split in the river. Again, variables such as the number of rivers and splits, the width of the river, etc. were made editable.
Overall this project was a great opportunity to work in a team with other disciplines and create a phototype game fitting to a relatively strict brief. I found working on the map generation was by far the most fulfilling part of this project, especially getting to set it all working together by the end!
Designers: Blayne Cuzner, River Kent
Artists: Jonah Bauer, Cassandra Zanin, RJ O'Sullivan, Anna Barrett
Programmers: Callum Burden, Justin Cragg