Dev Time
4 week pre-prod
14 weeks total
Team Size
15
Focus
First Person
Game Design
Tower Defence
Tools
Custom Engine
Unity
Blacksite: Deep Horizons is a movement focused Wave defence shooter in first person perspective. Armed with a versatile weapon and a trusty AI drone, you must defend drill sites as enemies swarm the underground cavern.
Fight in two unique levels, using your grappling hook and agility to move around the level, upgrading your weapon and utilizing your strategic drone.
Building upon our engine from previous project "Order of Roses" our team Win Win games set out to create a first person game. Taking inspiration from the "Frontier Defense" DLC in Titanfall 2. We decided on making a movement focused shooter with wave defence features. As many of the programers used this project as their portfolio project, there where many features they wanted to implement, and me and my fellow designer Felipe Fleming decided to take on the challenge of creating a cohesive and working game loop.
This project was created using C++ with PhysX implementation.
A beta build is available for free on Itch.io
I took on a broader game design role for this project, focusing on concepting, documenting, and refining the game loop, as well as being responsible for the secound level, fracture caves.
During production, we decided to create a modified version of the traditional tower defense game with a twist: no towers.
Since movement was the core focus of this project, my idea for the game loop was to encourage players to move around the map as much as possible, while still maintaining the classic "prep phase" between waves. One major challenge I anticipated was balancing and fine-tuning the enemies and waves, preserving the difficulty and strategic elements of classic tower defense games while keeping the experience accessible to new players.
To promote player movement, we included multiple defense points that required players to move between them, whether by surfing across rooftops, using grappling hooks to reach towers, sliding down ramps, or bunny hopping.
Additionally, upgrading weapons between rounds required players to quickly reposition to the center of the map, which served as a hub area
What was my role?
I'm very proud of my team and the effort we put into this project. It's not easy to modify existing genres, as they are already so tried and tested in terms of what works and what doesn't.
Building upon a preexisting game genre and removing or altering one of its fundamental design pillars can be really challenging to pull off.
However, through effective communication within the team and weekly showcase meetings where we discussed design problems and developed solutions, I learned that you can create something great if everyone works towards the same goal. This is something I've grown especially fond of with this group of people.
Blacksite: Dark Horizons stands as a testament to teamwork and the determination of students embarking on their professional careers in game development.
What I've learned
About the project
What was my role?
What I've learned
Team Size
-
2 Level Designers
-
6 Programmers
-
2 Procedrual Artists
-
4 Graphical Artists
Development Time
4 Weeks Pre-Production
14 Weeks total / half time
Tools
Dream Engine (our custom engine)
Unity for level editing
Focus
Game loop & Game Design
Level Design
Balancing
Production & documentation
Scripts
PhysX based movement
Advanced AI
Currency and upgrades
Wave Manager
About the project
