Firmly Planted

Unity: Creating A Building System, Unity UI Programming, NPC Pathfinding.

Game Design: Working with a team with different strengths, rapid prototyping and iteration, What to do when you can't solve a problem.

Draft Studios came together during a meeting in class. Many of us were already friends from a previous semester, but we had never truly worked together. We came together at first just out of convenience, but before we even began working on Firmly Planted, we made several game prototypes to find out what kind of game we wanted to make. In the end one of our team members pitched a 3D strategy game where you play as a tree, and the rest is history.

I took the role of the lead programmer. I was in charge of programming all the systems that appear in the game. You'll find those features below.

We only had about two weeks to create a prototype for the game. This was my first time ever creating a building system for a game. The skeleton of what we ended up using in our final project appeared here, but in this state It was little more than a proof of concept rather than an actual prototype (items falling underneath the plane, objects being placed inside the plane, objects being able to be stacked on top of each other, etc.). 

I designed this system, but the actual implementation was with the help of another programmer. The player can hover their mouse over a plant that hasn't been placed down, and then place the plant by pressing the space bar. There's a catch, however, you can only place down the plants if they are within a certain radius of the tree and other plants around it. Because we are using a grid system, the players are only able to place the plants on "tiles" that are directly adjacent to the tree and the other plants. 

An unintended consequence of this system was that sometimes you can plant plants on top of each other indefinitely, but it is quite difficult to actually achieve this bug and we still never found out what caused it. 

I created a very simple control screen that can be navifated by clicking the buttons that say Prev. or Next. Each of them takes you to a different screen that explains the mechanics of the game. While the player views this screen, the game is paused.