The results are in. I’ll be working on the HTML5 tower defense game for my capstone project! This was my first choice out of five project proposals, so I’m very excited to get started.
The Project
This will be a single-player game wherein the player must defend their “towers” against waves of enemy units. There will be at least three different levels with at least 10 enemy waves per level. Enemies will come in at least three different types. Defeated enemies will provide some benefit to the player (like coins or energy) that they can use to build more towers. Lastly, each level must be challenging (a brand-new player shouldn’t be able to beat it), but winnable within 10 minutes. More details found here.
The Team
There are three other students in the team: Cliff, Nam, and Abraham. We’ve already hammered out our team standards document, which determines stuff like how we’ll communicate (Discord chat and weekly voice calls), work standards, conflict resolution, etc. This week we’ll be focusing on creating our project plan.
The Plan
Our instructor posted an impressive example plan created by students in a past term. It laid out almost all aspects of their game design and a week-by-week task list for each team member. I hope we can achieve a similar level of detail in our plan by next Monday.
This is what I have in mind so far (final decisions pending team discussion). We know our game will run on a browser, so we’ll be programming it like a webapp with Node.js on the OSU engineering servers. We’ll use Phaser 3 as our game framework. Maps will be created using Tiled, then exported as JSON files. We can use open-source art assets from OpenGameArt.org. We can even make some custom art assets if needed (I’ve been drawing, painting, and making digital art since I was a kid).
We haven’t decided on a theme yet. Right now, I think everyone is focused more on the game mechanics and how we will share the workload. It would be great if we could figure this out later after we’ve looked at the available art assets. Fantasy and sci-fi settings are popular. We could go that route or try something entirely new. But we may need to make that decision soon so that we can include it in the project plan.
We’ll have all these details hammered out (and more) by next week.
