Development Period:
January 2016 - April 2016 Engine: Unity Platform: Windows PC Role: Lead Designer // Systems Designer // UI Designer // Gameplay Designer Team Members: 6 Total 1 Producer // 2 Designers // 2 Artists // 1 Programmer |
Taking traditional tower defense game elements and mixing them with newer social game themes; Avian Assault is a hybrid-genre project marketing itself to both genders in a Birds vs Machines battle.
Avian Assault is a tower defense game in which emphasis is placed on the towers and not the objective at the end. This social focus intended to help players connect with their army and military had several strong themes, the most prevalent being taking care of your own resources. With proper themeing and several iterations we had a good baseline. No project or game I have ever worked on has come close to matching the spirit and passion that I have for games as much as this one have. Avian Assault started as a four person project and we were given 4 weeks to produce a prototype to bring into pre-production. In that four person team, we had myself as a Systems Designer, an Engine/Database programmer, a tech artist, and a Project Management Producer. Our team dynamic was fantastic and we instantly hit it off. This game showed me that a team that is happy is capable of producing fantastic content without having to go through grueling iteration cycles for the sake of checking off a few boxes. After our four weeks was up we gave our pitch to our executive producer and he selected our project to go forward and allocated us two additional team members to produce a vertical slice in 3 months. A Level Designer and a Prop Artist. With three months of production there were a couple nuances to tower defense I felt needed to be present in our game. I designed a resource system centered around the towers. Birds needed food to keep themselves operational, ammo to keep firing their weapons, and a third resource I dubbed morale. Morale was a way of tracking a bird's happiness. Morale scaled to a bird's damage. The lower their morale, the lower the bird's damage would be. While doing this, the rest of the team was hard at work creating a progressive level system, particles and other beginning levels of polish that would be implemented later down the line. Many production cycles and sprints later we were near the end of our allotted time and in a position where most of our work revolved around fine tuning the game to produce numbers that helped the game feel fun and challenging. A couple words about Quality Assurance & Testing. Numbers balancing is a difficult game. Without proper feedback and proper calculation the right numbers are more than challenging to find. We often used testing sessions multiple times a week and through data analytics I was able to fine tune our systems to match what players felt like was a fair challenge. Once we had the numbers down on various waves and tower powers. There came to my attention that something felt missing. In Avian Assault players play as General Athena, an Owl who the forest critters have elected to lead them as she was the wisest of them all. But she didn't really do anything. After pitching an idea for Athena to have a long cooldown special ability, we began testing and implementing until we reached a final stage. Athena's ability was on a lengthy cool down, and when activated would freeze every enemy on screen for a short amount of time.
When we pitched our Vertical Slice at the end of our Production Cycle. Our Executive Producer loved it. Other teams loved it. We loved working on it. If our training program supported further development past vertical slice, we would have petitioned to bring this project into full development. The best part of Avian Assault was the team. Having a team of passionate individuals can make an overly complex game idea (which this may have been at the start), become an intense project that is easily one of my proudest accomplishments in development. |