TAMK Games Academy

Team

Programming: Hannes Salo, Santeri Mononen
Graphics: Eeva Säilä, Veera Tikkamäki

The game

Our game is a 2D turn-based artillery strategy game for the PC. It is a local multiplayer game for 2 to 6 players.  The playable characters are ducks, which gives the game its name. The goal is to eliminate the opponent’s ducks using different weapons; the last man standing wins.

At the start of the game the player can set the amount of players, amount of ducks per player, HP, the length of players’ turns, and the amount of ammo for each weapon. The game has four different weapons. After the setup menu players get to place their ducks on the level. Physics also play a part in the gameplay. Besides just stationary platforms, the levels have structures made of different physics-based building blocks. These include wood, glass, and metal walls which all have a bit different properties. The game has five playable levels.

Design and development

The basic idea for the game was agreed on relatively quickly after some brainstorming with the team. We actually agreed on the team name, Ducktape, before knowing, what kind of game we would make. This gave us the idea of having the characters be ducks. The gameplay was inspired by Worms series, with Angry Birds-like building blocks. Graphical style for the game was kept simple, colourful, and cartoony.

Our team met on Mondays to see what has been done so far and to discuss about the tasks for each member for the next week. Some tasks did take longer than expected and we had to leave out some features we had planned to include (such as more environmental hazards within levels, and hats). However, the most important gameplay features were finished. We also encountered some problems (the scale of graphic assets, for example) that could have been avoided with better communication between team members.

To summarise, our goal was to make a 2D multiplayer game for PC and, despite some problems, this goal was achieved.  This project gave us all a bit more experience on what it is like to develop games.

Link to the game

 

Team members

Programming: Kalle Heinonen, Antti Tuomisto, Joni Tasala
Graphics: Jonas Forsman
Audio: Johannes Leipälä

Project info

In Block Wizard, the player must use their mystical abilities to survive an onslaught of enemies. The player can raise and lower the blocks that make up the terrain, thus changing the paths the enemies will take. The levels also contain green blocks. These can’t be raised, but if an enemy walks over them, the block falls down, sending the enemy down into the abyss. With limited amounts of mana to spare, the player must find out which blocks to raise in order to get rid of all the enemies.
However, there are times when there are more enemies than there are green blocks. In these situations, the player can also create turrets on raised blocks, raining fire on the enemies. The amount of turrets the player can create is small, but they might be just the thing needed to take care of some extra enemies.

Design and development

We held meetings every Monday during the first few weeks of the project, until we got to an agreement on all the necessary stuff. Programming happened mostly on Mondays and Wednesdays, with stuff being done during the weekend when necessary.
The members of our team enjoy various grid-based games, which lead us to the idea of making our own grid-based game. Various different grid-based ideas, such as a turn-based strategy game, but we eventually settled down on making a turn-based puzzle game.

The game went through quite a bit of changes. In the beginning, it was 100% 2D, but the game somehow ended up getting a lot more 3D look than it was supposed to have. The project was kind of supposed to be a 2D game, but the teachers gave us the permission to continue on with the 3D game. The movement system of the game also changed once or twice, as we found better ways of achieving what we wanted. We began with Unity’s standard Navmesh, but ultimately used an A* plugin for our purposes.

All in all, the game finished nicely. We kept the scope of the game small, but since we had three programmers, we could have maybe enlarged the scope just a bit. We also encountered some small confusion with version management branches, but said confusion caused no harm for the project.

Link to the game

Fox Thief is a 2D platformer game in which the player aims at gaining high score by collecting treasure, fighting enemies and surviving in the dangerous mazes of various locations.

Team koru:

Programming: Samu Aronen, Miika Laurila
Graphics: Terhikki Kataja, Oona Laakso
Audio: Konsta Savolainen

What has been done in the project?

We have created a simple 2D platformer game in which the objective to get a high score by collecting treasure on scattered around in a level. The player can move quickly around the level by jumping off the walls and sliding on the ground in the level.

The stages are “endless” meaning that the game ends when the health of a player reaches zero. The actual level layouts however have boundaries. The layout of the two levels in the game is randomly generated during each play. There is also one collectible diamond to which an arrow on the edge of the screen is pointing to

There are different types of enemies in the levels which will keep becoming more powerful as long as longer the player is alive. The enemies will also start spawning faster the longer player stays alive.

After the player dies, their score is recorded on a local highscore board. The second stage is locked and will unlock if player gets 10 000 points on the first level.

Game Design and development progress

The game design decisions were discussed and decided in team meetings during Mondays. After that the game was developed further during the rest of the week.

Even if we did our best with trying to get the project going right from the start, the workload built up towards the end. In addition, we had to make some compromises on our game in order to keep on schedule.
As a group we felt like having a project manager would have made a huge difference with time management and would have made the progression of the overall project a lot easier.

LINK TO THE GAME

Screenshots