A 2D online multiplayer tower defense game for 2-4 players. A group of diggers embarks on an expedition into a dark cave system to collect precious resources, build defense systems and fight back hordes of charmingly drawn mutant insects.
Trailer
Goals
Our design goal for Antagony was to create a tower defense game without the typical restrictions of the genre. We wanted to give players the freedom to freely roam the environment and build towers wherever they want, develop a resource system that rewards exploration and implement an accessible melee combat system. All this with full online multiplayer support for up to 4 players, an easy-to-use lobby system and, most importantly, some of the most charmingly disgusting enemies.
Specs
Screenshots
My Tasks
Introduction
Antagony was my second student project. This time I was part of a bigger group with specialised people. The team consisted of 2 programmers, 2 artists, 1 producer, and 2 designers. This time it was my job to design the whole game idea with one other designer and just that. I designed most of the turrets and a lot of the gameplay aspects.
Our programmers wished to make a multiplayer game to learn more about network programming. So we designed a coop tower defence game.
Later in the project I had to step in as a tools programmer to create small Unity editor tools for enemy wave setup and handling. Additionally, I was in charge of the GUI again.
GUI
From project to project, I learnt more and more about creating GUIs. Not just designing them but how they work, what the best practices are, and how different setups impacted the performance. So in this project a couple of more sophisticated elements got added. Objectives that automatically track certain conditions in the current level. Or a radar that shows where remaining enemies are located.
This was also the first project where I learnt how to attach GUI elements to objects.
Tools Programming
Antagony was the first project where I dipped into creating custom editor windows for Unity.
I created a small tool that would allow us to plan out the waves of enemies and the condition to get to the next wave. A designer could easily add waves, set the enemy types and amount, and where they spawn.
It was anything but beautiful, but it got the job done.
Post Mortem
To this day I am not happy with this project. We lost an artist during production and tried to counteract the deficit with free art assets from the internet, making the art style clash quite a lot.
The game's scope was also way too big for the team. Too much time went into making the multiplayer actually work so that the actual gameplay was cut short. Of course that was also my fault since I didn't try hard enough to come up with ideas to make the game more enjoyable with what we had.
The production of this project was quite a shitshow, and the game ultimately suffered a lot from that. But at least working with the team was fun as hell, and I learnt more about multiplayer technology and editor tools. On top of that, having a not-so-good experience with a project helps one to develop a better understanding of how to manage a project and prevent such mistakes again.