Postmortem

Successes:

• Making a tower defense wave spawner
• Making tower defense levels
• Making a gacha system
• Making enemies and giving them behavior to attack towers
• Making a deck system that deals cards to the player
• Making towers that can either shoot or buff/debuff
• Save system

This project really did feel like a culmination of what we learned this semester. We were able to use Unity and Github to develop all of the core mechanics of the game. The enemy wave spawner used coroutines and file resources, the tower system relied on prefab hierarchies, the card system relied on scriptable objects for both the gacha and the deck building, and the audio system works with volume sliders in the menu. We even have a save system that saves the player's progress with the gacha cards.

Challenges:

• Debugging APK specific bugs
• Deleting save data on PC
• Making and rigging models
• Locating files in Android
• Making the UI and card systems work properly
• Making volume settings work properly

Working with Android caused a lot of problems, since scene objects would become misplaced in the Android build and saving didn't work. We also created even more detailed models for this project, which took up a lot of development time and we had to cut down on other features like bosses due to it. This was also the first time many of us used Unity's UI system, so we had difficultly in getting the menus and volume settings to look nice and readable at the correct game resolutions.

What we learned:

• Making binary saves
• Making towers only shoot enemies and making enemies only shoot towers
• Using two scenes loaded at once to store variables across different scenes
• Using scriptable objects as data containers

We learned a lot of tricks on this project. We've developed our own syntax for creating enemies waves, enabling us to create new levels faster. We learned how to make binary saves and objecting targeting for shooting. We learned how to create multiple scalable systems (cards and towers) to allow us to create more content faster. We developed a system of a base scene that handles game wide objects and loads and unloads the main scenes of the game without losing data.

Possible future revisions:

• More levels
• More towers
• More varied enemy types

We genuinely believe that this project has potential and we're already talking about continuing to work on it after finals. The system to create more levels, more towers, and more enemies is all in place. We also still want to experiment with the core mechanics and balance the stats and drop rates. This game has room for more, and we are excited to see where it can go.