My Responsibilities
- Procedural world generation including terrain, resources, and path creation using a generated noise map and mesh-creation for rendering.
- Building placement UI and allow buildings to be placed on grid squares using resources.
- Resource management system, so that the player would have to mine resources to build more buildings, including truck pathfinding along player-built roads using A star pathfinding.
- Road builder tool that took a start and end position and constructs a road around the terrain.
- Tower AI to shoot enemies that would walk by with priority control (shoot strongest, weakest, first, last, highest health, etc).
- Enemy AI that would follow paths from outside the map to the central castle, taking away health if it got there including support for enemy types with different stats/abilities.
The Story
Me and a few friends were building small prototypes to try and find an idea that stuck with us, that would build into a full game. One of these prototypes was a 3D tower defence game.
The game would be themed around Lovecraftian horror (although the art style wasn’t implemented into the prototype) and would include an ever expanding map with resource points. To build new buildings and defence towers the player would have to run a logistics network from resource nodes with miners around to factories and then to storage for use in building.
This was my first experience with procedural generation and I learnt a lot about noise maps and custom meshes. To optimise the performance of the game I built code to translate the noise data into a custom mesh instead of the performance-costly boxes.