Cops VS Robbers

This Game was a university project that was worked on by me and three other people. It is a lane based, wave, tower defence game. It is a mobile game that was created in the Unity game engine and is designed to be both family friendly as well as exciting for people of all ages. We worked with a graphic artist on this project who had the majority of control over the look of the 2D assets but as a team we all pitched in when it came to the designs. 

For this game the main mechanical parts that I worked on was the shooting mechanics for the projectile based units as well as fixing and helping with the implementation of the upgrade system. I also was the lead on fixing both the enemies and the "Cop with shield" unit. I was the main contributor to the "Onboarding UI" implementation and design along with our artist. The sound effects and music where also found and compiled completely by me.

This week I focused on the initial planning stages of our game. This included working with the team and eventually settling on our 2d lane based tower defence game based on Cops VS Robbers.

We started out by researching other games with a similar feel to what we where going for and used those to brainstorm the mechanics we wanted implemented into our game. The biggest inspiration used was the game "Plants VS Zombies" which had similar mechanics, such as the lane based tower defence elements and is what led to us wanting to implement features such as our Cop cars that are a last ditch defence, much like the lawn mowers in "Plants VS Zombies".

We also came up with some simple concept art (FIG 1) for out artist to work with so we can explain to him what the assets we are looking for are and so he ultimately can create the first assets for out game. We decided on having the police be defending somewhere that the robbers might want to break into, like a jail to free there friends or a jewellery shop however as of this week the details are undecided.

FIG 2

VID 1

This week I worked on ironing out a lot of the bugs we had in the basic functions in our game as it is now. Firstly sometimes in the menu you are unable to place a unit after clicking on it, this was very quickly fixed by just rewriting the system so that it can track even if you double click on the unit when selecting it, because it used to select and then deselect so its good that it is now working.

I also worked on fixing the problem of the hit registration since the robbers are getting shot and its being detected, which we can tell because they are knocked back, however they are not actually taking damage. I implemented the health pools for the enemies and sorted out the basic damage reduction when hit so that we can track how much damage they are taking and if they are now defeated. I also then had to go back and make sure all the units do the correct amount of damage based on the damage table we created (SHEET 1). We wont be adding the upgrading feature until later but the base damage is implemented.

This week we had a week off so we where not working on our project.

This week I worked on the implementation of our sound effects and our music. I found some music that I believe suited our game well and got it double checked by our team before implementing it in. I think the music is definitely well done and fits in well so I'm happy with that choice.

As for the sound effects they took some searching but i found some very good free, copyright free sound effects that sounded clean and well made while also sounding like they where not out of place in our gaem. I got all of these double checked by out team so that we where all happy and then implemented them into the game. 

Our game now has soundtracks as well as sound effects for all the actions in-game and im happy with them all.

This week I worked closely together with our artist to implement the unit animations. 

He had created some assets and animations but they did not really fit in the game and looked very poor on the small scale factor of a phone screen. So we worked together to remake the animations and implement them into the game. 

All animations for the units where done in game, this includes the muzzle flash of the machine gun where the flash appears and disappears in game. 

The technical parts for implementing all the animations where very easy, this is both the animations for our menus, whether that be the acetal implemented gifs of the actions of our side menu opening in a much more clean fashion, this was all done during this week.

FIG 3

FIG 4

This week I worked on the events that happen during levels 14 and 15.

In level 14 and 15 the movement speed, spawn speed and damage of the enemies increases be a set percentage.

All of the coders worked on implementing these changes on the different levels that occur so that we could split the workload and get it all completed in a more timely fashion as by this point in the project we all had extra time and thought it would be good to give everybody something to do.

This did not take long to do so we started on gathering people for next week who would be willing to come in and test our game as that is what we had planned for next week.

This week we had the first large scale testing event for our game.

The main feedback we got is as follows:

• All units should have health bars 

• The health bar for the friendly units should be green and not blue as it is hard to see

• The Units should get faster and stronger more often as its to spread apart

These where the main feedback points so we worked on these this week. We managed to implement these changes quite easily and we then prepared our game for a second round of large scale testing and feedback next week.

The main changes i worked on where updating the units so that they speed up and hit harder and spawn more often. This was quite easy to accomplish as we only implemented the system last week so it was fresh in my mind, how to make these changes.

This week we had the second large scale testing event for our game.

The main feedback we got is as follows:

• Splash when the bullet hits the robber

• Cop car light effects

• Particles when Money is picked up

• Money visibility while in the building mode

• Fixing Land Mine shake to destroy

These where the main feedback points so we worked on these this week. We managed to implement these changes quite easily and tried to get as much done before we have a Christmas break.

We decided not to implement a splash when a bullet hit a robber because it could be mistaken for blood which would have bumped up our PEGI rating of our game which we wanted to avoid. I instead emphasised the knock back from the bullets when they collide with the enemies but not so much so they could get pushed back or held in place by tow many bullets.

This week we had our christmas break so we did not actually work on our game at all.

FIG 6

FIG 7