UNWelcome
Basic Info –
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Engine - Unity
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Platform - Android Tablets
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Development Time - 8 weeks (80 man hours)
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Team Size - 5 People
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Genre - Turn based Tower Defense Puzzler
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Design Goals - Create a tower defense that anyone can pick up and play
Game Overview -
Unwelcome is a turn-based tower defense game where you play as a witch who has moved to the suburbs for some peace and quiet. Unfortunately, you realize you’ve been having frequent visits from your inquisitive friendly neighbors.
The only solution to this is to summon your faithful demons from other realms to get the pesky neighbors out of your house.
A link to our documentation, more detailed level write ups, and postmortem can be found at the bottom of the page.
The Game -
During gameplay players can place one of 3 towers:
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Baphomet pushes neighbors away in the direction of the arrow
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Tamamonomae pulls neighbors towards her
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Maalik springs neighbors over obstacles
Players can summon demons (towers) by spending their health, and can regain health by removing neighbors.
Our game was designed to be fairly simple, but that it would encourage players to invent a solution to the problem in front of them (neighbors who won't go away). We had originally designed this game as a standard Tower Defense, but we pivoted the game to be more about solving puzzles, and less about traditional tower defense.
A focus of our design was not having specific solutions to a problem. So we designed our game to give players the ability to create a solution to a problem. That was a big part of why we focused on towers that could move enemies instead of simply killing. Our design was inspired by things like SpaceChem or Infinifactory, where a solution has to be invented, not found. We constructed zones for players to work in to accomplish this. By creating these zones we could begin limiting how many possible solutions there were, and subsequently help to guide players toward specific combinations of towers and ensure they understood the game.
The image below shows these zones. The green square is an neighbor spawn. Black is an impassable obstacle, and yellow squares remove the neighbors. The purple square is the neighbors objective point.
Personal Responsibilities –
One of my roles on this project was as a Game Designer. It was my responsibility to balance the game, promote as much fun with as few mechanics as possible, and help expedite communication between all members of the team. I handled overall gameplay balance for our game as well.
I was also one of our two level designers on this project. I was responsible for creating our tutorial levels, and some of our gameplay levels.
Game Design –
UNWelcome was balanced by editing Demon stats, and Neighbor movement. Neighbor spawn values, such as spawn rate, spawn amount, or neighbor path, were handled on a per level basis.
Each Demon has 4 important stats for Designers to change:
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The reload timer determines how long it takes a Demon to recharge before it can fire again. This time is measured in steps. Every step the neighbors take reduces the value by 1. The demon is ready to fire when the value is at 0.
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Push distance refers to how far the Demon can move a neighbor. It is labeled as push distance, but each demon moves neighbors in a unique way.
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How much energy the demon costs to summon. Energy also functions as the player's health.
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How much energy the player receives when they sell the Demon.
Changing these values allowed us to make very large changes on how the player interacted with this game.
Originally, the Demon’s cost was to be a currency separate from the player’s health. However, we decided early on to remove the summoning currency and make it the same as the player’s health. We chose to do this so that players would be making more difficult decisions, and hopefully because of the difficulty more interesting decisions. We wanted to promote a slower gameplay style; where players would consider decision carefully before making them. Then, once that decision was made and the action was taken, players would feel a sense of accomplishment in seeing their plans come to fruition.
Level 3 -
This is one of the levels I worked on. Neighbors spawn from the green tile, move along the lighter path to the witch, and are removed from the house if they touch one of the swirly yellow portals. I've placed red boxes on this screenshot to show the general areas I wanted players to be thinking about.
This level is partially a tutorial and partially a standard, simple level. This level was created late in development because our 2nd tutorial was not effectively teaching spring demon mechanics and attraction demon mechanics. I split the attraction demon off onto its own level because of this.
Players were also struggling to learn with our original tutorial levels, so I implemented a new style of tutorial to try and find a more effective teaching system. This level uses a signboard to keep the information in the player's mind. Earlier tutorials had the witch 'talking' to the player to teach them. This was a successful change. Players remembered the Attraction demon much better than they had before, however the spring demon as still not taught well enough and players began struggling with spring demons more.
This level also only uses teleporters as exits to teach the players about teleporters as an exit. Midway through development we needed an exit that was not attached to a wall, so our artist created a teleporter. However, since players were struggling with exits other than the windows, this level was also created to teach players about teleporters.
The text box was placed towards the upper right of the screen to keep it close to the pre-placed demon and help it remain associated with the pre-placed demon.
This level was kept mostly open to allow players to practice with demons more. The simple removal paths also helped this goal. Players could move neighbors to the exits with only 1 demon for a majority of the exit. The exits towards the end of the level required a combo though, to help reinforce the combo mechanic.