About
This was one of my final year university projects, I designed and implemented the gameplay while a friend created the 3D models and textures. The project is a casual strategy game in which you survive for as long as possible by building and commanding units to fight against waves of oncoming foes.
Defend your ship while collecting resources to build units, then position these units to defend you and your assets. Build harvest stations and call in bomber strikes to manage the waves of enemies. Give orders to your ground units to adapt to different situations. And when things get really messy, use your command vehicle to personally deal with the situation at hand.
This project exposed me to UE4 behaviour trees which were used to create very simple AI for the units. I couldn’t get the AI to work properly so the commands are all variations of “move to” with different objects as the target. ‘Hold’ for example, is just telling the AI to go to its current position, a very cheesy way to handle this, but it worked.
My favourite part of this project was the GUI, especially the radial unit menu which I spent a lot of time developing and restructuring before finally being happy with the design.
Early Prototype
This was the game at the beginning of development after only a few hours of work, our ambitions were very high and we had planned to have upgrades for each unit. It didn’t take long for use to realise that the scope of the game would have been way too much so the upgrade system was scrapped.