Sugarrush Defenders

High Concept

SugarRush Defenders is a 3D isometric melee hack and slash where you play as Teddington von Gumblade III. Save the world of candy from Baron Beetus using your candy sword and power by defeating countless numbers of enemies.

SugarRush Defenders was made by a team of 4 people over a period of 2 months in Unity .

Accomplishments

  • Player Mechanics

  • Drops/Pickups

  • Wave System

  • Prefab Understanding

Player Mechanics

In SugarRush the player has a basic melee attack, and 2 special abilities that can be picked up. Implementing the basic attack to deal damage to enemies was a simple task but it gave me familiarity with tools and systems I would be working with. The first special ability was Sugar High as it increased the players movement speed and damage. The second was an area of effect knockback to give the player space from the enemy. These two abilities allowed me to familiarize myself with some libraries and allow to experiment with executing behaviors and script structure to perform certain things.

Drops/Pickups

While a simple concept and component of games, the drops and pickups facilitated my understanding of how mechanics are created and function. I have played games for a while and I am familiar with many different mechanics and their functions in-game, but had not personally put the thought into the code behind the mechanics. Creating the drops and pickups were a way for me to dip my toes in the water and get used to the breaking mechanics down into behaviors and conditions and putting it all together.

Wave System

The wave system was my biggest failure on the project as it caused performance issues for our game due to an oversight of mine. The wave system performed too many checks and calculations too frequently causing performance issues. This was the first coding project I have worked on where this became an issue and was a great reminder for me. The problems faced caused by this system had me evaluate what I was working with, and readjust my approach to gameplay programming after furthering my understanding of game engines.

Prefab Understanding

An issue we ran into was work getting overwritten by other people, as this was many of ours first game and team game development project. These issues developed my understanding of both how prefabs function but also how different file types are handled by source control. It highlighted the importance of utilizing prefabs, what I like to call prefab trees and communication within a small team to ensure our work is getting in.