Introducing Untitled Tower Defense Game
Not a clever title, I'm just bad at names
This newsletter discusses what the project will be, my plans for the project, my rationale for pursuing the project. I will create a small game to highlight project management methodologies. This project will be my chance to apply the advice I’ve seen over the years. For example, I will show what ‘starting small’ means for my project. If I run into examples of feature creep, or decision-making, I’ll talk about them.
What is the Project
So what is the project? I will create a small tower defense game for the PC The goal is to create an entire game from start to finish. As the creator of Spelunky, Derek Yu said, finishing a game is a skill. I hope to practice this skill by completing this project. My success criteria is to release the game on Itch.io
Why This Project?
Why a tower defense game? Well, besides the fact that it’s one of my favorite genres, I have a deeper rationale. I have attempted and failed to release my personal projects in the past. After doing some introspection, I’ve determined that I failed for one main reason. My projects were often too large in scope. Making things worse, I did not have nearly enough time to work on the projects. I would start strong, but the projects would eventually drag on until I lost motivation and quit. This time, I wanted to create something I can easily finish. For this project I am leaning into my constraints
Constraints
Time
I have a limited amount of time, an hour a day at best
Skills
I’m an okay programmer, but I’m not a great artist
I can do a good job of prototyping a game, but it takes me a long time to program a feature.
This is time, I don’t have.
I don’t want to waste my limited time on creating art; that is not the focus of this project
Content
I really like tower defense games.
They have a very well-defined gameplay loop, so I won’t spend time trying to redesign things.
These games also have limited animation, which will save time.
The camera is zoomed out, which means art doesn't need to be high fidelity.
Scope
I will know the scope once I write the game design brief, but I have a few scope targets below.
I’m targeting between 5 and 10 levels as a goal.
My goal is to finish this game in 12 months.
Solutions
I’m going to approach this project differently to give myself a better chance. I’m using Unity as my technical solution. I actually built a tower defense game for my master’s thesis. It felt really good to program features from scratch. The problem is, that it took quite a bit of time to program even a standard feature. My codebase also became unwieldy over time, which made it really difficult to make any changes. This is called Tech Debt.
This time, I’ve decided to use Unity, and a game starter kit called The Tower Defense tool kit. This kit will allow me skip a lot of the common steps in programming a tower defense game and spend more time designing content.
I am also going to use content from the asset store. Art is the first thing people see with a new game. I want to save time on art creation, and I want a certain level of quality so that people take the game seriously. The Unity store has a wide variety of assets perfect for RTS and tower defense games. I will still need to do some type of creative direction so that all of the assets work together. Using both a starter kit and assets from the Unity store should give me a greater chance of finishing this project
Plan For Coverage
My goal is to provide a regular check-in on the project via this newsletter. As I stated above, I will use the project to highlight project management concepts. I’ll explain things like setting up a project and milestone planning. I’m not sure what the cadence will be, but my goal is to update this project at least once a month. I’ll do posts on project management basics In between game updates.
That’s it for now. Be sure to sign up for this newsletter (It’s free!)