The Capstone Project: Castle Defense
Top-down Shooter
Tower Defense
The game is a mostly Top-Down Shooter Tower Defense game, that merges gameplay of player abilities and movement to the tower building and defense against varying AI of a Tower Defense game. The biggest challenge for the development of the game was adding variation and Ai and AI spawning as well as adding verticality to the flat and linear gameplay style that most games of the genre follow. With that, there was a heightmap to the game that allowed for players and AI to walk up creating a whole new plane of strategy to the game and difficulty for that matter because it was decided you weren't able to shoot up or down the heightmap.
One thing we did like and implemented in successfully was what we called the garrison ability, which allowed the player to jump into most towers to control where the shoot and even upgrade some of the towers to shoot different projectiles and shoot at all enemies at a distance farther away by increasing the attack range when not in the tower.
My Contribution:
Responsible for the project management, documentation, and manpower allocation for a team of 4.
Responsible for the creation of the Game Design Documents and all other required material for the creation of the game.
Created and managed the iteration of each level layout of all 3 final levels.
Investigated and Debugged the game for Quality Assurance of the game and its systems.
Scripted all the tower and defensive options in addition to the tower variations and tower upgrades.
Scripted the ability to load and save games.
Integrated all the art assets created by the artist into the UI, Towers, Maps, ETC.
Created and maintained the final and test builds to allow for playtesting.
Facilitated all team member communication and feedback to move towards the most optimal solutions or to gather more information.
What is the Capstone Project?
What is known as the Capstone Project for Full Sail University is the last 4 months of the degree program where you and a team up to 6 people get together and create a game from the ground up. My team was 4 people deep and I was the defacto project lead as I knew most of the team from previous projects during the degree and my team liked how I communicated often and thoroughly in conclusion to keeping everyone up to date on all the information they needed to succeed.
Development Trials:
Our Project had many trials and tribulations during its development with initially being a 2d game but to design constraints given to the students after development has started, the project had to be rebuilt in a short amount of time to fit a 3d gameplay style. Along with one team member failing out of our group and only receiving one working artist we were the smallest team that completed the capstone project.
If you would like to play the game or have any questions about it, any information can be given to you by the contact information on the resume page of my website.