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Technical Games Designer
Tactical Galactical
September 2020 - April 2021
Formerly Battle Chess
Heroes Guild: Welcome
For my final year project at university I decided to create a fantasy x-com prototype with enemy movement based on chess, the theme changed multiple times through production but the core elements are the same: A player with x-com inspired tile based movement & enemies with chess based movement. However, during development I became enamoured with the idea of spawning all elements in which led to me creating an in-depth spawn system using data tables to create the level layout as well as the enemy and player spawns.
Heroes Guild: Projects
As the sole developer on this project I took on all roles other than producer which was filled by my project supervisor.
Roles and responsibilities:
Game Design
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Creating the design document.
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Planning out all technical elements.
Technical Design
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Creating a grid spawning system with added functions for creating player spawns, enemy spawns, camera blocks & enemies, as well as different enemy types.
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Creating an in depth and customisable breadth first search system for player movement as well as a much simpler version for enemy movement.
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All other technical elements.
Level Design
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Planning out 10 simple levels to demonstrate the prototypes capabilities
UI Design
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Creating a basic menu system
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Creating the main UI screen & prototype menu which allows for quick level traversal
Research
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Conducting numerous playtest to help determine the state of the prototype as well as to discover missed bugs
One of the core mechanics in this prototype is the grid spawning system. Using a series of data tables I created a spawner that goes through each column checking the values and spawning in the relevant data. I later also appended the enemy class to the end of each enemy square which is used to determine which enemy should spawn.
However, the grid system also powers all other core elements of the prototype being a core element in the movement, attack, blocking and pickups systems all of which use a map of struct keys containing coordinates and the corresponding grid tile as the value.
Simplified Games Design Document
Trailer
Progress Video
Itch,io Page
Heroes Guild: Projects
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