Last Habitat: Deep Sea Defense

Nice Nine developer team presents
Last Habitat: Deep Sea Defense

Games Academy Autumn 2017 – 2D game project Last Habitat: Deep Sea Defense

About the game

Last Habitat: Deep Sea Defense is a sci-fi tower defense game set in a grim future where nuclear wars have left continents uninhabitable and the last remaining humans are forced to live in an underwater colony. Your mission as a player is to defend this colony from human-eating sea monsters by building towers. There are four different tower types with unique properties you can built alongside a canyon that the sea monsters use to attack the colony. Last Habitat features an in-game Wiki that holds useful information both about the towers at your disposal and the four distinct sea monsters that you will encounter on your mission to protect humanity and its last habitat.

Wiki that can be opened from the main menu and from the in-game pause menu.

The game has five levels to play through and each level offers more content and new challenges to overcome. As you make progress in the game and unlock new levels, you will gain access to use new tower types and encounter new sea monsters to defend against. The focus of the game still remains the same: protect the colony by building up defenses and survive the waves of monster attacks that will otherwise wipe out the colony and  the entire human race.

Sneak peek from level 4: Lights In The Dark with open tower build menu.

Design process

The design process of the game started with a planning session where the team members narrowed down game ideas into one that could be created within a few months’ time frame. The game genre and idea was quickly chosen to be a sci-fi tower defense game done in pixel art, but initially the game was going to take place in space. To deviate from a popular choice of space as  a game setting we moved our project to take place in the deep sea.

Our design process continued with research on tower defense games to understand what requirements, elements and features should the game have to be a decent one. From that point we started to design the tower and enemy types and thought about how many of them would we need in our game. We came to agreement that we should aim for four different types of both towers and enemies that there would be enough variety to the game. We managed to accomplish this and also created a unique tower type: Solar Link, a twin tower that creates a damaging ray between two towers. Similar type of towers are very rarely seen in any other tower defense games and we are proud of our Solar Link -tower type creation.

One built Solar Link twin tower in action and another one is being built.

Our team encountered a few problems on our design process. As we were working on to create an Android game, the user interface and head-up display elements went through several changes in order to make them large enough and more easily understandable for the player. We tried to give the player more feedback about their actions and also created an in-game Wiki to give the player more information on the tower and enemy types as opposed to filling up the screen space with constantly visible lists or multiple pop-ups. The most troublesome design flaw was the initial use of an energy popcap instead of more classic in-game currency. Late in the project we had to make the hard decision to scrap the energy popcap and replace it with in-game coin currency with very little time to enhance the gameplay experience for the players.

Towers can be managed from the tower menu that opens when tower has been tapped.

Last Habitat: Deep Sea Defense has five levels to play through. At first we had planned that the game should only have three basic levels and an endless level but after few playtests we noticed that three basic levels weren’t enough. We decided that the four first levels introduces player to all tower and enemy types and the last level is a challenge to test the player’s tactics. Unfortunately we don’t have the locking system yet implemented, but it will be in the published game version like the other last adjustments that we are currently working on. We were also forced to drop the endless level, as the replacement of the popcap solution with in-game currency also mixed up the games balance. We hope to still implement the endless level to the game before launching the game on Google Play Store in the first half of this year. On the launch we will also implement the achievements to the game as we will be using the Google Play Services to do it.

Playable versions are available here for Android and PC:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1LFnbrSjAm1pZhJVD1ndi5GkQy-cyW2kA?usp=sharing

Nice Nine developer team

Programmers: Lauri Leponiemi & Ville Niemi
Graphic designers: Nea Ohvo, Piritta Vaarala & Jerkko Valta
Sound design by Lassi Kähärä