Aztec TD
Aztec TD is a Tower Defence game made by myself and a small team for Ludum Dare 50 with the
theme: 'Delaying the Inevitable'.
The game itself is an endless free flowing TD, meaning that there is a time limit between rounds in which you can place
one of three, Fast Attack, Heavy Attach, or Currency collecting, towers. Overall, we were happy with what we had
created over the weekend and had fun at our first Ludem Dare.
One of my roles in this project was to create the functionality for the towers in the game.
This started with creating a Base Actor for all towers which would store variables that would be present in all
subsequent towers; such as Health and tower radius. As well as setting up a basic component structure so that we
could easily swap out meshes in the towers actors that would be used during play.
This also included creating the functionality for finding the closest target in the turret radius, spawning projectiles,
and dealing damage. This was then passed onto another designer to intergrate into the grid placement system they were
in charge of.
Probably the largest scope of this project for me personally was creating the AI behaviour for the enemies in game.
Not to say that the AI was complex but it had been the first time in a long while I had to program AI behaviour. The
behaviour was made using Unreal's Behaviour Tree and Blackboard systems in which I dictated the AI behaviour using custom
behaviour tree tasks to confirm whether the AI should be moving down their lane, or attaching a target. Overall the AI I
created at the time is functional for purpose; but I can see things now I can tweak and reconsitute to make it a lot better.
My other task on this project was the creation of UI and it's implementation into gameplay and Menus.
For the Menu UI, I took insparation from Aztec art; using symbols, patterns, and font that would fit in
with the main theme of the game. Then created a Menu system for frontend and gameplay using Unreal's UMG widgets.
For the UI in the gameworld I kept with the theme of Aztec but also leand heavily on MOBA's such as League of legends
and DOTA 2 in order to create a style that would be easily recognisable by most players and fit well on a screen that
that would be flooded with minions.
Finally, I works on the layout and design of the level we used for the final product.
This started with itterating on many different lane sctructures until I had a design that felt would be able to
provide a balance of difficulty and fairness for the player in certain situations of waves spawning in.
Once I had the final art for the environment I placed the environmental props thoughout the level, ensuring that the lanes
were easily visible, but also have the feeling of a dense, lost rainforest. Once this was done I passed the level onto an
artist for a final lighting run.
If you would like to play Aztec TD, you can find it by clicking the link below.
