Castle On Wheels

The Game:

Castle On Wheels is an experimental railed real time strategy that takes the shape of a tower defense game. The point of the game is to move through, level by level, of challenging enemies and fortifications to remove the enemy and push them back once and for all. 

As the player we give you two mechanics to work with: spawning units around your castle on wheels and moving your castle along a predetermined path. The castle movement resembles a tower offense type of game play while the spawning of units resembles the real time strategy. With dynamic and engaging levels and compelling enemy behavior we want to immerse the player into the world and allow them to believe that placing a castle on wheels is the probable solution to the issue at hand.

The Development:

As the Lead Designer taking on this project I have had lots of time to prepare this game for development and conceptualizing this game. Bringing out the key points that were important to teach the player strategy and keeping them engaged. Nothing could have prepared me though for having to then take this idea and bring 15 other people to see the same game that I could see. 

As challenging as it was, having prepared a digital prototype, provided a plethora of concept art and came in with a solid understanding of how all of the pieces would fit together I was very excited to see all of the members of our team begin to work in solitude and create exactly what I had envisioned if not better than that. The initial speed bump was the communication. As much as we had there were still a number of team members that required more direction than others which was to be expected. However, sitting down with them one on one, collaborating and throwing around concepts brought the vision gap to a close and allowed for consistent work across the board.

The First Sprint:

Off to a bit of a rough start it was up to myself and my Producer to make sure that one, we both saw the idea and that took a little more than originally thought but eventually we both saw the game that we are attempting to create and after, the flow was a sight to behold. Having struggled to find a solution that worked for maintaining consistency we had to adjust some of the teams tasks to ensure there would be no challenge later. This only took a short time and before the sprint was even half way over we realized the mistake taken by setting every modeler to concept their own work was a bad idea for fear a lack of consistent work would be produced. 

After fixing the confusion we sent the modelers to plan the textures and mood boards for their models since they were aware of their first model we were waiting until we had concepts to work with before setting them off on their own and below are the examples of what they had come up with.

By giving this task to the 2D artists we were able to only need to monitor two people who would then provide the readily created concepts to the modelers for creation. With one artist handling game objects and interactables the other was the conception of environmental assets and both had done an exceptional job. From a different group during the sprint we were taking care of the physical prototype to show the team and our executive producers the way the game is being designed to flow and how the player will interact within this environment.

I had enlisted myself and two others to help me with this and after completing the main prototype we attempted to play the prototype to see how it would unfold to find there were some holes in strategy and a lack of necessity for one of the primary mechanics. In this game there are a lot of moving parts that are not controlled by the player so we attempted to fix this by adding an enemy behavior that would teach the player some different strategies they could use to help out smart the enemy. This showed promise as the play tests after this point provided some clarity and watched the play testers use the mechanic more.

In the programming field of the first stage I was having them establish a written representation of how the necessary scripts and variables will talk to each other from one script to another. This had its own set of challenges since some of the programmers on our team did not have experience with class maps (UML’s) but with a brief tutorial they were able to create a valid solution and very detailed understanding of the necessary classes and variables they would need. 

Finally level design, I was more versed in this field since this is where my tasks originate from when I am not assisting with design. I started off with creating my own level to give my designers a place to start. This meant creating annotated maps depicting the levels height, enemy placement, level flow, and enemy range so we could tell where the strategic locations on the map are. The challenge with this was to have the level designers do a handful of things at the same time: increment difficulty of the game from level to level, be mindful of exploiting strategies that the player can use, and having dynamism in the levels to make the players feel immersed and want to return to the levels again and again. 

A challenging task is to monitor all of the moving parts and create the path the player will follow without them knowing that we had set that path for them but this is why we are level designers.

In conclusion, we as a team did an amazing job coming together and communicating with all to make sure that we were not only on the same page but just as excited about the project as I was. Seeing the teams faces light up when I tell them what I am looking for as if they just realized how cool this could be or had their own idea that they produced and was accepted as a valid change was a very fun and engaging back and forth with everyone. All the mental blocks and confusion of the requested tasks were quickly drowned away as we began to see concept art form and really fun mechanics coming together. I cannot wait to see what we can produce as a team by the end of not only this next sprint but with the rest to follow until we publish. We are all working really hard and learning so much.