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HomeHeart: What is there to know?

HomeHearth is the resoult of the last big game project assignment of the Technical Artist and Game Programming courses called Stora spel, or Big Game. The game was developed by a team of ten creators, seven of which are from the Game Programming course and three from the Technical Artist course. Some of us had worked together on a smaller game project earlier the same year and as we thought we worked really well together we thought to continue as a team for this project, with an addition of six people of course. I was elected leader and scrum master by the group and continued to lead our group to an (almost) finished game at the end of the year. I took the responsibility of creating the buildings, characters, rigs, animation, textures, UI graphics, and water method for the game.

HomeHearth is a tower defense sort of game meaning defenses are built around a base. The base in this case is a tiny little town populated by villages. At night monsters start to crawl out from the shadows (forest around the map) in waves and start dealing damage to the houses in the town. As the game progresses the waves get harder and harder to deal with and at some waves bosses and different creatures start to appear. If defenses happen to be in the way of the houses the monsters prioritize breaking down the defenses first. If a house were to get destroyed the villagers that lived in there pop out and start running around like crazy, vulnerable for the monsters to kill. Once all the villagers or players defending the village are killed, the game is over. As it is, the game can not be won, but players can work together to survive the most rounds. Oh, did I say that the game is multiplayer? It is hosted on a server and up to four players can join a lobby and play together. Players can upgrade defenses, their own strength, and health. There are also two different classes a player can choose from: Warrior and Mage.

We did not really have an excessive amount of time to throw around concept sketches, but the fun fact is that the game was supposed to take place during summertime. This got changed though because... Well, the season outside started to change and I got fall feelings! The others did not mind the change after a small speech on my part at the morning meeting.

To date, we as a team are planning to redevelop the game in a less obnoxious game engine (one that was created by professionals, like Unreal or Unity) in the future and further develop the game into something that could actually be interesting to more players. As it looks now, the idea has changed a lot and I am excited to see what might come of the new game, may it be far in the future.

That fun little picture on the right there is only used for A-Star node placement. Each pixel represents one node and one length unit in both Maya and our game engine. The texture is 70 x 70. The gray means "Spawn node here", The blue is the placement of the houses, the blue is the placement of trees and rocks, the yellow is where the lake is, and the black bridges. The different colors are necessary to tell the AI how to act around these areas. For example: things can be shot through the yellow area but not the red.

All the stuff

Some of the building components

The characters

The Level

The graphic