Evan Darling
Game Designer
Missile Command
Solo Reworked and Polished: 3/2018 - 4/2018
Original Group Prototype: 2/2017 - 3/2017
Responsibilities
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Designed and implemented the quest system and 2 missions, with accompanying rewards and strived to test the systems in order to achieve balanced gameplay.
Game Designer
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Designed and implemented the level progression system using C# scripting, and employed testing methodologies to polish and iterate on the player experience.
Missile Command Gameplay
Missile Command is a unique recreation of the classic 1980's arcade game by Atari. It was designed first as a prototype of the classic game, and once our team of 5 successfully made a working prototype featuring all of the mechanics of the arcade game, we then took it to the next stage and started implementing our own unique mechanics into the game.
Missile Command was originally prototyped over the course of 3 weeks for an academic course, and being a group student project with a short time frame meant that the was very little chance that it would receive a lot of polish. This never sat well with me, but after the course was over there was never enough time to revisit old projects.
Now, I have completely overhauled and polished our version of the classic missile game. With the overhaul, I focused on getting every system to a shippable state, which included adding art, sounds, and particles to assets, and required a massive change to our progression system. In its previous state, the game was nearly unplayable past the first few levels due to how unbalanced the enemies were. The enemy projectiles were re-balanced, starting off slow during the early levels and gaining speed as the game went on. Our boss enemies were removed from the game as I realized that to make them interact in a meaningful way with the game's systems would require an unreasonable amount of development time dedicated to a single system. In their place, I added a wave-based progression system for each level, with enemies speeding up after each wave.
With this revamp, I received a chance to design a new system based off of my design passions. This new system is the game's quest/mission functionality. Missions provide the player with extra objectives to complete during the game's level's, and I designed them to take advantage of dynamic gameplay that can arise from the game's mechanics.
Missile Command title screen - the text is typed out by an animation thanks to a free asset from the asset store, giving it a retro look and feel.
The objective of each level is for the player to protect their generators at the bottom of the screen from the enemy projectiles, and the levels progress after a certain number of enemies have been destroyed.
Image of the player defending against the enemies of level 2.
An example of the text that is displayed whenever a level is completed. At the end of each level, the player is awarded 2 points for each generator that they managed to save. Like the title screen, this text also is slowly typed out by an asset system.
The Upgrade Store - Each upgrade has a specific score cost to purchase which increases for every upgrade that the player activates. The player can earn score by completing quests, killing enemies, and completing levels without losing generators.
During their time in the upgrade store, the player can purchase missions with score. Each mission has a specific objective to fulfill and once a mission is completed, the player is awarded with score and an ability unlock designed around the mission objectives.
Once a mission has been accepted, the player can access and check on their accepted missions from the pause menu to be reminded of their objectives.
Once a mission objective has been fulfilled, the player will be presented with a menu stating that their mission has been completed and they will be given detailed information about its rewards.
An example of the defensive shield ability that the player can unlock from completing a mission. The shield can only be activated once per-level, and once activated it prevents the generators from taking damage. While active, the shield will also fire defensive projectiles to destroy nearby enemies.
An example of the tri-seeking missiles that the player can unlock from a mission. Once unlocked, the player can fire 3 burst-missiles that will each individually seek out enemy targets, at the cost of a large amount of ammo. The seeking missiles are the yellow projectiles in the picture.
Once the player has completed all the levels they will have won the game. After the credits roll, the player is presented with their final score which is then calculated to check if it is a new high score record. Once everything is over, they are sent back to the main menu to play again if they wish to try and beat their high score.
An example of the game before my polish and revamp project.