My Candy!

October 2014 (2 weeks) Status: Finished!

Platform: Windows PC

Team size: 8

Engine: Unity

Language: C#

Role(s): Team lead, Lead designer, Programmer, Audio and music

Download Link: WindowsExe

OVERVIEW A wave based survival game. It's Halloween and the townspeople have all been turned into candy stealing zombie pumpkin people (try saying that fast 10 times over). You must survive an increasing amount of zombies every hour taking out the enemies with your pumpkin seed firing blow gun (this game was given an 18 rating due to the fact you were essentially using the zombie pumpkins own organs to destroy them). Prevent them from stealing all your hard earned candy and survive until midnight!

DISCUSSION The following is a transcript of the video above

This was a game created by a team of 8 of us for a 2 week game jam at university, it wasn’t 2 weeks straight as we had other classes etc. My role in the project was team lead, lead designer, sound, music and a little bit of programming refinement to get the game feeling and playing as best as possible.

It’s a simple wave based shooter game where you had to protect your cauldron of candy from pumpkin headed zombies who would steal your candy from it. You’ll see in the top left an indicator for the player’s remaining candy. Once the player has made it through 12 waves and to midnight in the game world they will successfully survive the pumpkin invasion and beat the game.

If the player loses all of their candy then it’s game over! and this is the only way to lose the game, you’ll notice that if the player comes into physical contact with the pumpkin zombies that they will be tempororaily inactive and a respawn timer will appear in a random pre chosen position on the map. This was one the earliest design decisions made to really up the tension of play, leaving players amped up raring to get back in there and protect their candy. and to amp this up even further everytime that the player dies their respawn time will increase by one second, and in the later stages of the game every second counts. all these decisions were made to create a tense and challenging experience for the player which leads into the reason for creating this video!

This video is really to have a discussion about the design decisions and rationale behind them to give you a better idea of the design behind the game, the drivers of engagement and what not.

Really at the time of making this was around the time where i started to see the economies behind games, and that every action the player makes could be seen as expending a resource. So take For example street fighter, when you throw a punch you also let down your guard for a certain amount of time. So you're exchanging time and safety for potentially reducing the opponent's life resource, typically the stronger the hit the more time you spend in a vulnerable state. and games like resident evil 4 whose economy of ammo and gold was really well tuned to a great tension and release curve throughout the entire game.

So that was the key thing i had in mind while designing the finer points of the game. Also Using candy and bullets as a multipurpose resource the player expends and viewing everything as a kind of transaction. So you’ll see enemies, in a way, cost bullets to kill, you can also spend those bullets breaking down the fences which are essentially shortcuts which in the later stages of the game, are incredibly helpful to the players.

Timing also plays a big part in the game, the player must be conservative and time his shots well so to not waste their bullets. We made sure to give the players just a little more than enough bullets to eliminate every enemy that would appear in those waves. not requiring absolute precision from the player, but certainly not giving them enough ammo to spray and pray.

And then with the candy as well, mainly being the lives of the game when the player runs out they will lose the game. But players can also spend candy to reduce their respawn time and also purchase ammo from the ammo shop that appears between waves.That exchange of one currency to another interested me, defining the value of each and having an exchange rate. It has the player have to think about what is most valuable to him at the time, the current wave the player is in would also tie into this decision, respawn time becomes incredibly precious in later rounds, as you could stand to lose more candy in that second you’re not playing, than the actual cost of buying back that extra second.

Moving around the level was also another economically based action, seeing as you’re spending time to be in one place than another, risking the safety of your cauldron while you at another place. The players were capable of getting more candy by destroying a genie that appears every round. There was also a ghost bullet powerup which temporarily allows the players to shoot through walls. The spawn of these items would cause a desire in the player but they would have to quickly make a decision of whether it was worth moving to that point and leaving their cauldron unsafe. This is why we randomly scattered the ammo as well.

And this element of play becomes even more tense later. in early waves zombies only come from the left side of the screen, and then as waves progress more spawns will open up, meaning the player must pay attention to more of the areas on screen.

We were pretty brutal with the player on this one really, but i think that adds to to the experience, we wanted a tough game that takes time to master, being such a short and small game we wanted players to have to play through multiple times before they really understood what was required to master it. It really had that arcade game mentality behind it.

This was all intended to create interesting decision making processes for the player while playing the game. later it gets high pressure and these decisions must be made quicker, but i felt this is what made a game as simple as this really engaging for a player. They have to learn how to be wise with how they spend ammo and candy and when to the right time to spend it is. There are constant decisions being made by the player, with just a small amount of relief time for them at the end of waves and in between. All of this really helped make the game a lot of fun for our play testers. The whole team was really happy with the end result and had a lot of fun making the game too.