Hellward is a 3D tower defense game, where the player must protect a jewel located on top of the middle pyramid. The player has 3 phases per cycle, gathering, preparation and defense.

The gathering phase involved sending out workers into the map to collect wood, stone and metal at various speeds and efficiencies.

The preparation phase was where the player used the resources to make any last minute changes, upgrades and optimizations to the towers placements before the hoard of monsters came. 

The final phase of the cycle, is defense. There are 3 types of towers fast, medium, and slow shooting each with their various damages. These attack the incoming monsters from the locations they were built.

Issues with the game:

Unfortunately as this was our first year project, all of us new to making games and working in a team a lot of issues arose. From mismanagement, people going off to do their own thing and major communication issues leading to the map being over 10x larger than necessary destroying the original plan.

The team consisted of 3 designers, 3 programmers and 2 3D artists. Being one of the programmers we had a lot of work to do and assigned ourselves area's, Enemies, Towers and Resources. With the other 2 programmers majorly involved in the design they took up the enemies' and tower aspects, while I took the resource management and collection. 

My task was to spawn in random materials around the large map. The player could fly around and collect the materials by clicking on them to assign workers, and correctly gather without issues. Obviously the resources would have to be easily interfaced with the shop aspect for the tower building and upgrades as well.

Unlike the original plan however issue's arose as the team leader vanished along with an artist and arguments between the designers and other 2 programmers ensued, leading to the final result being a click and collect type gathering rather than any AI workers. Unfortunately as this was a first year project and stored on the universities GIT, I'm unable to get photo's or code snippets as the GIT servers are wiped every year and it was all stored locally on my university account i can no longer access.

Learnings

As this was my first real experience making games and working in a team, I learned a lot. Clear communication is vital, especially when talking with teammates to ensure timely and efficient progress. It was also my first time using Unity, Git hub, and Discord. It was all valuable experience, especially overcoming nerves when talking about my own ideas and really helped set me up for my second year, allowing me to produce more interesting work and be more involved in team collaborations.