The first impression and the initial idea

This was an adventurous small jam. At first I though: Easy, a littel black and white game would be a nice, limited side project. After some sketching on paper and an older project which I wanted to redo for quite a while now, the idea quickly became more outlined. I wanted to create a small lane-based defense and strategy game, which is suited for two players. The basic idea is this: two opponents, three lanes and some pretty basic units: a collector, an attacker and a heavy attack unit. Combined with a bit of resource management and tactics this would be a nice game for some intermezzos.

A quick start Since the idea came along quite quickly, I needed to setup the project and define an artstyle. For the project I simply created a basic unity app with a simple menu and a game view - all in 2D with URP enabled. Also the basic game logic was implemented quite quickly since I didn’t need fancy camera movement or something else. With this in mind, I had a working prototype fairly quick. For the artstyle I headed for some simple black and white sprites in 2D.

When the reality hit I hadn’t much spare time,so I really needed to focus on what was worth to implement and how to set my focus. I recognized that it’s not that easy to use some sprites and simply invert them - especially when you’re really limitited to just two colors (not three or more). So, no gray allowed - nor any highlight colors. I learned quickly that one has to switch the thinking of the coloring process and that one side really has to be distinct white while the other one could be inverted. In the sense of not spending too much effort on creating every sprite twice, I decided to go with an color inversion shader and to add an outline to completely black sprites - sounds fair, doesn’t it? I realized, that adding the shader and getting back into shader graph cost me a hell of a lot more time than just simply inverting the sprites by myself. But where is the fun in this? So I stayed with the overcomplicated idea of inverting shaders and was finally quite happy with the generic outcome.

The cleanup and balancing phase After the graphics were basically set, I jumped back to the game mechanic, linked all back together (the cost, points, units and playing field), did some play-testing with a friend of mine, added the core logic for the second player (up to now the second player just spawned the completely same units the one self - which was quite challenging and a lot of timing issues). I then added some basic sound effects and main theme (also with a lot of ideas in my head to create a masterpiece of generic sound, which didn’t worked out at all). I then adjusted the map a bit, made all the buttons generic (e.g. you can think of choosing your sets of units in the screen before the game screen - the buttons are then added automatically with the linked prefabs) and re-worked the lane buttons. All together also did some tweaking on the base map and added the “defense” towers.

Building the release version for the jam As usual the deadline was suprisingly close. I was on the road and working the whole day, so I didn’t manage to build a release version in prior. It was fairly close with the submission, liek a minute before the actual deadline. But I managed to submit the game. I’m quite happy with the jam entry and that I joined this jam. However, I’m not so happy with the view in the web-gl app (everything is quite tiny) and it’s quite hard to read the stuff. Also the sound design needs some work over. But at least I fixed some UI and button issues (last upload).

What is upcoming I think this game has a lot of potential. Some things that I have in my head are:

• A nicer and easier to read UI
• Some more units and the option to select like 4 units out of 10 to start into the game
• A simple AI that allows a single player mode
• A better support for the webgl build
• A better worked out sound design

I’m happy to spend some more time with this game. We’ll see what comes next. Thanks for playing and reading this article.

Cheers, Mat