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Siege of Pendennis Castle
Overview:
Siege of Pendennis Castle is a top down tower defence game where the player takes the role of a royalist commanding the last lines of defence during the siege of Pendennis in 1646.
The core gameplay of the game involves the purchase, placement and upgrading of various tower types as the waves of enemies get harder and harder to defend.
Responsibilities:
- Lead Designer
- Systems Designer
- Level Designer
- Sound Designer
- UI designer
Contributions:
- Research into the time period of 1646 and the technology of the time
- The design of each place-able tower, their upgrades and their function
- The design of the level as well as enemy waves
- Lead of playtesting and balancing
- The design and implementation of all the game's sound
- Designed and did some programming for the games HUD and menus
Design Philosophy:
Being the second year team project at Falmouth university, teams were tasked with basing a game on a criteria of your choice within a group. For this game, our team went with the choice of history as our criteria. Taking advantage of the location, we settled on the siege of Pendennis Castle as our historic event to base a game on.
Due to this, much research went into the time period where the siege took place to gain inspiration for gameplay. In the end, we settled on a short, replayable and accurate tower defence.
Design Process:
In the beginning of development, documentation and research was the main goal, and soon after the designs of the place able towers and enemies the player would be interacting with. Early on in the design process, I wanted each tower to stand out with a unique purpose, alongside upgrades based on actual technological advances at the time that would further diversify the options available to the player. With these choices, the team's goal was to create a difficult, but learnable and replayable experience that rewards player knowledge and micromanagement. Early in playtesting rose a problem however with the usage of many cheaper units being far more effective than saving for more expensive ones. Due to this issue, the solution of exponential price increases was introduced, intended to both solve the issue of diversifying viable options and giving a nod to the history of siege, being only lost when the castle surrendered from a lack of resources as they were all spent over the time of the siege.
Reflection:
One of the main skills developed during the development of this project was my skills when it comes to sound design and implementation, as this was my first time doing so without any aid of a Unity extension such as Fungus. While much more work could have been done on this project in the ways of optimising sound implementation, this experience has been a core lesson that I have carried forward and improved on in all my future works I have designed sound for.
As well as this, another lesson learnt from the project's development was the importance of agile practices such as task boards, stand-ups and sprint planning. Early on during development, these forms of communication were not in place, meaning that early development was much slower than later on when these practices were in place. In projects I've taken part in since these documents were made earlier on to establish clear communication and establish a consistent pipeline for development that has been invaluable to the projects success's.
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