Kubulio

This game was created for a two month course called structure of Game Production. I worked in a 4 man team to create an experimental themed game. The first month was spent prototyping and writing documentation. Month 2 was spent coding the game in C++.






The Premise of this game is that a large corporation wants to cool down a planet covered in magma so that it can begin development of its luxury resort. You play as the Tiki god spirit of the planet protecting its home.

 






The player uses control of gravity among other abilities to throw lava out into space consuming the hostile space ships, Fighting through a combination of 6 different types of ships each with unique abilities.









Two special attacks that can be used when enough score is accumulated.They will light up when ready for the players use.

This Attack is the wormhole. You control the entrance and exit of a 1-way wormhole. The player is allowed to move around both the entry and exits allowing him to send enemy ships where ever he wants them, preferably right into a blob of lava. Some of the larger ships cannot fit through the hole, so alternatively the player can send his lava through the entrance right into the larger ships hull.







The second special attack is the core explosion. The planets core explodes raising its temperature and sending lava rocketing into space in all directions. This ability is great for clearing a wave, but puts the core in temporary vulnerable state till its lava returns to the surface.







Instead of a health bar use a thermometer. Every lava blob in our game has its own temperature. When they pass through the core the blob combines with the core transferring its temperature. This keeps the lava hot and dangerous. The enemies in our game attempt to cool down the lava into frozen blobs, so when they combine with the core the core has to expand much more heat to warm it up. Let enemies stay alive too long and the cores temperature will drop to 0 making it habitable and quickly renovated. Game Over.

Swarm Tactics

 

 

            This game was created as a final project of a fun class called Structure of Game Design. I only had a few weeks to finish and turn in this game, so it is limited in scope. However I'm proud of what I was able to create in such a short period of time, especially because it was my first attempt at game programming. I used a few Starcraft sprite sheets that I lifted from the interwebs to serve as my units. And I used audio from the internets and the provided Full Sail sound bank.

            The inspiration for this game came primarily from the Starcraft binge my roommates and I had subjected ourselves to the previous month. During that time I heavily played the Protoss. I enjoyed playing with a particular unit of theirs called the carrier. This unit had no weaponry itself but could create up to 8 fighter drones called "interceptors" which it would send to fight in its stead. As long as the carrier lived it could keep creating interceptors, this mechanic struck home with me, as I was fascinated with this abstraction of the weapon from the body.

            
 The project was open ended, it just had to meet a set of technical requirement, other than that the design was completely up to me. So I created Swarm Tactics.




The objective  is to survive for 5 minutes against increasing numbers of enemies.


Survival after 5 minutes allows the player to accumulate more points for the purpose of setting a new high score.






The player controls a fleet of carrier ships and a swarm of fighter drones as two separate entities. The Body of the player was represented in the carrier unit which when all killed would result in a game over. This unit had no weapons and could only move and create interceptors.

The weapon of the player is the interceptors. These units were very fast and were each equipped with dual lasers, they could fly in front of shots aimed for the carriers sacrificing themselves to save the precious carrier, which became an essential part of keeping the player alive.

The player has direct control over his primary carrier, controlling it with WSAD to move it around the game world. Additional carriers purchased will auto follow the primary ship.

 If a carrier is destroyed all 8 interceptors that it created will self destruct. If the primary carrier is killed, main control is switched to the next available carrier, essentially serving as extra lives.










The interceptors are AI units that are controlled indirectly through the reticule system. To guide the interceptors the player moves the location of the reticule with his mouse and changes its radius with the mouse wheel.

The Interceptors will only attack targets within the radius and will fly back into the reticule if they go outside of the radius.This  mechanic allows the player a lot of control over his interceptors, with an easy interface.







A tight reticule can be drawn around a single unit to have his interceptors focus fire it down.




















Or a wide radius can be drawn around a group of weaker enemies which will cause the interceptors to split damage among multiple targets.







 





Additionally the radius can be placed around the carriers move the interceptors into the line of fire, absorbing incoming plasma fire.













When the last carrier in the players fleet is finally taken by the swarm this post game report is shown to the player.To let the player know what happened during the round.









Finally, If you can bear the bright colors, this last image shows a glimpse into how my AI and collision works.

Red Lines: Interceptor/Carrier drawn between actor and next nav waypoint.
Blue Line: Interceptors, drawn between actor and enemy target.
Pink Line: Enemy Units, drawn between enemy and its next nav waypoint
Grey Line: Enemy Units, drawn between enemy and its target.
Red Square: The Collision Volume of the object infront of it.



 I'm going to try to put a link for download up in the future, but it might be a while because I'd have to crack it open again and make sure it works on different machines. There were a lot of features I still want to add to this game. If I decide to reopen this project I'll be sure to post the changes and give updates.

I hope you enjoyed checking this out,
-Lord Cosine

Begun the job hunt has

I am currently tricking out my website and juicing up my LinkedIn account. I've sent out a few applications but haven't got much back. My plan is to make this site showcase everything I've done. Making me a sexier candidate for employment. Hopefully it helps, Also I just bought tickets to PAX, hopefully I can make some nice connections there