Gameplay Programmer
Techno Towers
Developed: February 1, 2021 - August 11 2021
Techno Towers is a rogue-like, tower defense, indie game that is published on itch.io. Initially a submission to a game jam, Techno Towers has since been developed into its 1.0 release which was recently released.
Team Size: 10
Engine: UE4
Code Language: Blueprint
My Involvement
I implemented the enemies, relics (power-ups), and spawning mechanics. I also helped design some enemy types, relics, and the maps. I also handled the balance of the game and created multiple tools to assist with this process. The game was created with Unreal Engine 4 primarily using Blueprint but also with some C++.
Post Mortem
Techno Towers is by far the largest game I’ve worked on and I’m fairly proud of it. It has hours of content and is quite mechanically complex. It has a fairly unique manga art style and looks decent. It was the product of my first game jam and resulted in the formation of a wonderful team.
Despite all this the game has some glaring issues, first and foremost being its difficulty. It is too hard. To this day none other than myself have even gotten to the last level. This means that between 75% and 25% of the content is never seen by players. This was due to a lack of playtesters and time. Another big issue is that there is a large amount of programmer art due to many of the team members moving out of state for college. Overall I’d say that not enough time was designated for polishing the game and too much focus on new content when we hadn’t even playtested the old content.