game design

• core idea

  • this project was developed for the Quiver Games Incubator which was a 2 month-long mentored game jam program.

  • knowing we only had 2 months to develop our game, we starting by designing several small scope game ideas together. by the end, we all agreed on an idea of a DJ tower defense game. the original concept was a third-person action defender, protecting your music gear from hostile fans! similar to something like Orcs Must Die.

  • after some discussion, we pivoted to take advantage of the rhythm elements a DJ character allows. meaning our concept was now a mix between rhythm and tower defense.

  • we decided to ditch fighting the audience and introduced vampire enemies, cause vampires are cool! also because this way the player is saving the fans and is rewarded by them, in the form of hype(currency), for playing well:D

• reference games

  • with a core concept, we then looked to similar games for inspiration/reference. however, we quickly found that rhythm x tower defense has almost never been attempted before. 

  • to continue forward, we looked at examples of both genres that we enjoyed such as Bloons TD, Plants vs Zombies, Crypt of the NecroDancer, HiFi Rush, etc. from these examples, we came up with some secondary mechanics such as:

    • a UI rhythm indicator and gameplay elements pulsing on-beat for  UX feedback

    • performance-based currency/score system (common for rhythm games but uncommon for tower defense)

    • on-beat attacks (attacking/activating towers is the rhythm element, your ability to play on-beat, affects your performance)

    • multiple enemy spawns (as the game progresses, more enemy spawns are activated, increasing difficulty)

• synergizing strategy/rhythm

  • the biggest challenge was finding how to synergize tower defense and rhythm gameplay. one is very strategical and requires methodical play while the other is very quick/reaction-oriented. 

  • we wanted towers to attack on-input with accuracy to the music determining efficiency, but we had to balance this with the strategic element somehow.

  • originally, players could assign inputs to placed towers but, assigning multiple towers to a single input would increase it's cooldown. the intention was that this would add strategy to tower placement. however, this didn't quite work as input assigning felt arbitrary and many players couldn't memorize the inputs. this was also too many steps at a time for players giving them decision paralysis.

  • to fix this, we made tower placement slots have a pre-assigned input. this proved easier to memorize and reduced mental load. it also helped strategy as now there was more risk vs reward in tower placement.

 

 

level design

• 2D layouts

  • for our level, we wanted a concert layout with multiple enemy pathways and many tower placement locations. to get an idea on scale, pathways, and difficulty, i created 3 different 2D level layouts to test.

• blockouts

  • after making the layouts i blocked them out in Blender and play tested them to get opinions/feedback.

  • with the playtest feedback, me and Brenden, the other designer, blocked out a final level iteration including ideas from all previous iterations.

 

 

art

• mood board

  • to find an art direction, me and Adam, the other artist, created a mood board, we took inspiration from early 2000s vampire rave media such as Bloodrayne, Blade, etc.

• modelling

  • as environment artist, i modelled everything in the game except for the characters. 

• vfx/shaders

  • i also worked on the vfx/shaders using Unity's shader graph, creating an ink shader + about 10 vfx.

• set dressing

  • on top of modelling the environment, i also brought it to life through set dressing. my goal was to make it look crazy and rave-like while keeping gameplay elements free of clutter.