Indie Game Dev Recycle Bin

I’m Terry, and i’m responsible for both the design and art on the game. Initially, I was startled by the fact that our group did not have an artist, and truth be told it did increase the work load significantly for me, but in the end we managed. The core design of the game consisted of three things; Unit stats/balance, Level Design, and the weapons triangle. 

Both unit stats and level design were recorded in the Level Design Document. The way I handled that was, I made an initial map layout with all the units in their spawning tiles, and ballparked the stats they would have. After that, we would piece together the map in unity and begin testing and altering stats and placement as we go, updating the Level design doc when we settled on something that felt balanced.

For the Weapons Triangle, we initially looked at the way Fire Emblem handled it. Fire Emblem gave extra damage and accuracy to the weapon that had advantage, and the opposite to the one that didn’t. We realized that adding extra damage gave units TOO much of an advantage, swaying the course of the battle more than we’d like, so we limited it to just accuracy.

Todd Hamilton - Programmer

It was my job to create the core elements of gameplay, mainly AI. The first step was making a map creator that can be used from the Unity editor. This involved learning about prefabs and editor scripts.

The next step was creating player movement. I used the Dijkstras path finding algorithm to find a path from the player unit’s current tile to the selected destination tile. I used Linear Interpolation from each tile to move the unit along the path. After creating movement, I quickly implemented attacking enemies (Insta-kill) so I could begin work on the AI.

Each enemy units AI works by getting all the player units it is able to reach and attack. This is done using a fill search to get all units within movement + attacking range. These units are added to a pool where they will be sorted out until one is found which is ideal to attack. The less-ideal units to attack (Due to the weapon triangle) are then removed from the pool of units, followed by the units with highest health. Dijkstras is then performed to find the unit with the shortest path in the pool. This is the unit that will be attacked. If no unit is in range the enemy unit will use Dijkstras to find the closest player unit and will path as far as it can towards it.

The game i’m designing/doing art for has now reached the point where it is semi-functional and playable. This, along with getting further into level design, means that I at least have to attempt to balance characters before actually testing with them.

Working full time on art and design over a short period of time, especially when i’m not proficient in either, inevitably leads to both of those jobs being done poorly. When you’re doomed to failure (or at least mediocrity) by luck of the draw, or more specifically being basically shoved into a crowd of people and told to socialize and find team members when you’re in a field made up of mostly antisocial people (including yourself) in the first place, leading to missing obvious essential parts of a team, you begin to lose faith in the project since your role becomes extremely stressful thus even further hindering the potential for the project to become successful on any front.

Since my group  consists of two artists and a single designer, we decided that an SRPG would be a fairly programming-intensive (AI, pathing, etc.) and art-minimal (Fire Emblem-esque sprite art) choice. We’ve decided to keep the base foundation of fire emblem, including the rock-paper-scissors interaction between melee weapons and a flat plane, but have decided to add on a small skill-based minigame to try and differentiate ourselves a little from the inspiration (more on that in the future). 

But since we haven’t actually started with production, I’ve decided to try and get a head-start on art. Here’s a sprite: 

Over the next (approximately) two months, I along with two Programmers will be attempting to create a game. Here’s the catch: we have no artist. While for me, that means a whole lot more work than I was expecting, but for the onlooker (that means you!), it’s an opportunity to point and laugh at both my horrid art skills and possible mental breakdown from trying to juggle Art, Sound and Game Design while trying to lead a group.