Fall of Civilization

As the sole member of the project, I wear many hats, as a Technical Designer I am able to switch between roles of Designer, Programmer and Producer as they are needed. Designing, prototyping and polishing a variety of systems.

While tweaking and balancing aspects of the core groundwork I worked on all gameplay features including but not limited to:

• Combat
• Skills
• AI
• Unit Interaction
• World Interaction

To show you how I work and my thought process, I'm going to use one of the core mechanics, in this case Combat as an example.

Combat

Combat includes a range of different interactions and abilties including but not limited to dealing damage to enemies, buffing your allies and debuffing your enemies.

The video above shows some of the core aspects of Combat in action; Hitting a target, Death, Missing, Landing a Critical Hit and using a reaction to being attacked. I will be going over the Standard Attack as shown in the video, this is an ability that all units possess and can use from the start of the game. Due to the size of this feature, even in its simplest form, it has been split up into five images below of the developement in Unreal Engine 4 via Blueprints.

The Attacker and Defender are saved into local variables so they are easily referenced throughout the system, these are overwritten at the start of each attack. A visual marker is placed on the tile of the defending unit to signify the target of the attack and the current focus of play. The units are rotated to face eachother for better visual representation of the combat taking place, something I've always debated removing, instead giving the attacking unit a bonus if they attack a unit facing the other direction, giving the combat an extra tactical edge. Units only get one Action per turn, so the Attacker uses their action and the unit HUD is notified so it can be updated to show that. There is a check to determine if the two factions are already at war, if they aren't the function is called. If the two units have a height difference greater than the tolerance, certain bonuses and penalties are determined that could impact the combat.

Each Unit starts the game with a random trait, this gives them a passive effect that will impact their performance. For example the unit may start with the "Fists of Steel" trait that gives them a 10% bonus to damage attacking with no weapons, or the "Zed Head" trait that gives the unit a 10% penalty when using Utility items. If the attacker possesses a ranged weapon but has no ammunition for the attack, it automatically fails. This is a concept I have considered changing to either units having a local amount of ammo that needs replenishing or ranged attacks not requiring ammunition at all but instead suffering an attack penalty the further the distance from the target. If the attack can continue, the game compares the attackers and defenders statistics to determine if the attack hits or not. This is done by calculating the Attackers ( Accuracy, Weapons, Train Bonuses, Trait Penalties ) vs the Defenders ( Dodge, Armor, Trait Bonuses, Trait Penalties ) aswell as factoring in aspects such as ( Distance between Units, Amount of Cover between units ) which can help or hinder the attacker.

If the attack fails to hit there is a brief situtational status that appears above the units to inform the player aswell as adding the event to the games log, which is both useful for keeping track in-game and for testing purposes. On a successful hit before any damage can be calculated there is a percentile chance the hit becomes Critical, based off the attackers Critical score with random chance. On a Critical Hit the damage is increased by a multipler and the defending unit is stunned until the start of the attackers next turn, otherwise damage is dealt as normal, there is a visual representation of the hit and the attacker is awarded an amount of XP for the hit.

Whether the attack hits or misses, if the Defender used the Counter Attack ability on their turn, they proceed to make a Standard Attack against their attacker and their ability is now disabled so it doesn't cause an endless loop.

Fall of Civilization

Fall of Civilization is a Turn Based Post Apocalyptic Strategy/Simulator. Can you survive in the new world or will you fall into dust? 55 backers pledged £1,053 to help bring this project to life. You'll need an HTML5 capable browser to see this content. - (30 days)

At the end of July of 2015, I started a Kickstarter Campaign alongside my other modules and my Final Year Project for Fall of Civilization. The aim was to reach my goal within 30 days and using those funds to commission two artists, 2D and 3D respectively to do:

• Controllable Unit Model
• Faction Base
• UI
• Unit Art

The funding was reached successfully in just over 3 weeks and these were the results.

During the course of the month campaign, I posted regular updates in regards to the games art, planned features and current development.

Around this time I was approached by a an independant publishing house (NewRealityGames) and a small music studio (GlideStreetMusic). NewRealityGames were interested in taking care of the publishing side of my project, helping to get it passed on Steam Greenlight and published onto Early Access. This was an ideal solution to me, as a solo developer I have to micromanage my time, focusing on my strengths and outsourcing the rest. 8 months after the end of the successful campaign, the game was accepted into Steam Greenlight.

GlideStreeMusic were interested in exposure and were happy to offer their services in the creation of some tracks for the game for free.