March of the Mechanized Menace (my version of Glitch Garden)

[Johan]

Here is my take on Glich Garden from the 2D C# course that I have named “March of the Mechanized Menace”.
In this game you will use a force of Cats to defend a yarn factory against waves of mean robots.

Play March of the Mechanized Menace in your Browser | ShareMyGame

First off I have once again managed to overcomplicate things for myself.
Second I feel I’m starting to feel like I’ve gotten a hang on C# and Unity now as in most if not all of the lessons in this course section I just listened to what was going to be introduced and did it from my own mind first, and then went back and watched how Rick would’ve done the same thing.
Now with that out of the way…

Do I think this is a good game? No
Am I satisfied with it as a creative thing I tinkered with and put effort into? Yes.

A big part of the not a good game issue I blame on the fact that I personally don’t think these kind of games are fun on a base level so I never felt any motivation to dive in deeper and make it fun.
But now this project is over and it’s on to the next one.

Here are some neat things I did this time:

• A Character Randomizer that picks a random set of body parts & colors to each character as well as picking if it’s male or female (difference in what eyes & sound clips the character gets)

• Original Art, VFX & Music, SFX

• Gridspace Highlighting

• “Skeletal” animation

• Maximized the use of a single Character Prefab

• A Healthbar prefab that can be used by any prefab that has a Health script

Known issues:
The player units were drawn in a smaller resolution than other art assets, but I realized that way to late in to convince myself that it was worth the hastle to redraw all spritesheets that make up the characters.
The font used in the game has a tendecy to skip characters like ’ & -.
The Volume control only effects the music not sfx.
At a point in every level you earn so much resources that you can fill up the whole grid.
Healthbars can fail to visibly empty themselves

[Yee]

I enjoy this kind of games a lot and I hate that is one of the least shared projects, thanks for putting it out there.

I enjoyed it, I didn’t like the credits-like intro to be honest, I rather have a big wall of text than something moving, it makes reading difficult for people with eye or reading problems.

As a programming and unity exercise I think you did an amazing job, from a game design view, well, you didn’t deviate much from the original project which isn’t bad but a little deviation never hurts.

There are two issues besides the ones already mentioned:

I can place two turrest in the same place, it happened more than once, not sure how I did it, the game gets a little messy during the final levels so not sure how to replicate the bug.

The hands are inverted for some reason. Not only during the starting screen but also during the game with certain animations.

Now comes my game design feedback if you want to improve in that particular area, if you don’t, then you can stop reading.

• The super turret is pretty much useless, I was able to beat the game using only basic cats, block and resources.
• As you said, there’s a huge imbalance, there are way too little enemies and way too much resources, but the first 30 seconds is the opposite, way too many enemies for so little resources. Unfortunately there’s no easy fix, this is one of the most complicated parts of this project.
• The block cat is OP, like seriously over-powered, it blocks way too much damage, one you get a lane full of normals cats and a blocker there’s no way any enemy can get past that.

One way to make this type of games more fun is with a rock-papers-scissors approach, for instance, the big enemies counter the blockers but they are way too slow to deal with the fast turrets, dogs can take down fast turrets easily but one shoot of the mega turret and they are done. This forces the to player to be thoughful about where, how and when to position the turrets. Of course, that’s just a simple solution, there are many more.

Last thoughts, I enjoyed your game, I think you did a great job art and programming wise.

[Johan]

Thank you for the kind words & taking time to play the game.
Good thing that you pointed out scrolling text might be difficult for some people, I had never considered that, I will think of it in future projects.

I checked and fixed the issues you found since ShareMyGame is allowing one to replace a upload now it has been taken care of (same link).
Turns out the box collider didn’t cover the whole grid square, so yes if you clicked near the top of the square you could indeed place 2 units in the same position.

The hands were inverted in some animations because I only made one left and one right hand, and never bothered to do anything about it.
So if the character is facing the right that’s when it looks bad (since it was drawn in what is its idle animation).
Because of the way I made the character generator there wasn’t really a good way to fix it at this point, so I made the hackiest of hacky fixes and added a extra plain white sprite over the thumb contour theat gets the same color as the rest of the character and is shown/hidden as needed.

So I guess the lesson there is if you know of a visual problem fix it right away before you get too lazy.

To be honest I barely used the blockers myself since I would reach the point where I generated so much resources that I would just fill the whole grid with the heavy throwers.

I think this project would’ve benefitted greatly from having a designer to just tell me how things needed to work.
As it is I just used the balancing diagram from the lesson.