Siege and Sorcery: Iron Defense

Welcome to the fantasy world of Siege and Sorcery: Iron Defense where you can build, defend, and fight alongside your turrets in a fast-paced first-person shooter. Manage resources to strategically develop and upgrade your battlefield to survive onslaughts of diverse enemy types.

Post Mortem: We learned quite a lot while working on this project. The first was that a good thought out plan is always needed before starting a project. There was a UML made prior to the coding being started and when things within the UML were well defined they integrated seamlessly. There were however moments where the UML was vague or not as well defined, which led to some merge conflicts. Another thing that we have learned is that a lot of game making is trial and error. We originally had four classes, paladin, rogue, ranger, and artificer, however we found early on into development that the artificer had too many abilities that were similar to the others and was hard to balance, so we had to get rid of it. We also originally had three additional turrets that spawned resources, health, and mana, however we found that it let the player automate the game too easily, and since we made it first person to encourage the player to work alongside the turrets we ended up changing it so that resources came from enemies instead of being spawned by turrets. 

We also all learned much more about how to use unity in our respective areas. For those who worked on the HUD and start screens they learned a lot about how to format the many pieces of information we wanted the player to have. Our level designer learned how to use the terrain tool better so we could make cliffs and volcanoes. Our 3d artists learned how to use the VFX graph to make more complex effects, and this let us create the many different turrets we had planned out originally. We also learned how to work better as a team. Most of the members had worked together on multiple game jams before this, however this project was much larger than our previous ones. We learned how to communicate with one another better and organize meetings despite everyone having many different projects across classes, and we learned how to support each other by doing our best in our respective parts of the pipeline.