Farm Defence - Project Insight

Farm Defence is an isometric tower defence game for mobile devices. This school project was worked on alongside other group members in my course, each of which had “specialized” roles in the group we would be responsible for. For the development of this game, I held the role of Game Producer.

Farm Defence features a cartoonish aesthetic with simple tower defence gameplay, inspirations include games like Bloons Tower Defence and Plants vs. Zombies. In the game, the player must help a group of farming rabbits defend their base from predator animals using various towers/items. Items available for the player to use consist of towers that deal damage to enemies, a scarecrow tower that will scare enemies that approach it, and plants that can be harvested in order to obtain more resources. Resources can be used in order to build, repair, and upgrade towers, as well as restore your base’s health. The game will end once the player can no longer hold off the endless wave of enemies and their base loses all available health.

Personal Contribution

As each group member in my team was assigned different roles, we each had individual tasks we needed to prioritize, as Game Producer it was my responsibility to make sure all tasks for a milestone were being reached. I also assigned myself the duty of creating the project update videos that were required for each milestone, as well as updating the Game Design Document (GDD). Normally the Game Designer would be in charge of updating the GDD, however, the Game Designer on our team had decided to leave the team due to other projects. As Game Producer I also was responsible for the submission of each milestone, as well as presenting our progress with the project to the rest of the students in the course.

Parts of the project I specifically worked on consisted of the: Scarecrow Tower Behaviour, Audio Settings, Health System, Enemy Variants, initial implementations of Saving/Loading and Towers, as well various bug fixes. Everyone in the group was able to work on their own parts of the project as well as contribute in some way in order to deliver a final product, everyone also worked in different parts of the project for minor adjustments and bug fixes.

Since I am most interested in Game Design and I was not able to be the designated designer for this project I was somewhat disappointed, however, I also felt as though I was the most suitable member in my group for the Game Producer role and am thankful I was able to take on that position. Throughout the project all group members were able to bring up and implement their ideas for various design decisions in the game. Taking the Game Producer position allowed me to take more of a leadership role and was very helpful in showing me more aspects of game development I may otherwise have never wanted to try.

Conclusion

If I were to add to / change the project, I would try to add the ability for towers/objects to be placed anywhere in a certain section of the level, this game mode would likely replace the “endless” mode, and the levels with a specific design could potentially be used for a story mode portion of the game. This would give more replayability for the endless mode, and still allow for handcrafted levels to emphasize the player’s strategy.