Hex & Horde

Hex and Horde is built around 2 phases of gameplay. You have a gather and build phase and a defending phase. In the gather and build phase, you have 2 minutes to gather materials, build your defenses, and visit the shop to upgrade your character and buy potions. You can build walls, turrets, and other structures to help you hold off the horde of enemies. In the defending phase, you can’t gather or build anything, you must use the defenses you have prepared to combat the enemy's invasion of your base. You have 4 different spells at your disposal and a trusty bow and arrow to help you annihilate the ghouls. You are awarded gold for every ghoul you kill. The ghouls will get stronger every round so be sure to use your gold in the shop to improve your chances of survival.

[How To Play]

There are various resources around the map. From most to least useful, Gold - Mana Crystals - Stone - Wood. Check your Build Menu to find out the cost of building each structure. Be sure to plan out your resources, opening the build menu will pause the timer to give you time to do so. If you need more information on which structure to build or what your spells do check the Game Guide, this will also pause your timer during the day so take your time to learn. Build up your defenses in the Build and Gather Phase while you can, it only lasts for 2 minutes. Use your time wisely. You can’t build once night falls. You can only access the shop when you are at your camp while in the Build and Gather Phase. You will be prompted by text on the screen when it is available. Good luck defending yourself from the horde of ghouls.

 

Controls

WASD - Move

Shift - Run (Day only)

Space - Jump

Right Click - Aim

Left Click- Fire Selected Ability

1-5 - Select Ability

6 - use Health Potion (You have to buy them first)

7 - use Mana Potions (You have  to buy them first)

8 - Open Shop Menu (Must be in camp and during the day)

Tab - Open Build Menu (Day only)

G - Game Guide

E - Gather (Day only)

[Post Mortem]

 

What went right?

Overall, we feel that the development process of the game went very smoothly. While we did not stick exactly to our plan of what features to have done by what week, we did get other parts done in the place of others and we feel it came together well in the end. We are also happy with how the premade animations we used came out in the end when interlinked with our programming. The build system with its snapping to a grid and phantom objects works really well, and we are proud that a complex system functions as well as it does. 

What went wrong?

The teleport spell needed to be fixed (clipping and not working in build). A minor code change needed to be done to fix the build issue. To solve the issue if clipping did occur we made the player return to a spawn point if they fell through the map.

The camera was stuttering/sticking, a change of build settings fixed the issue.

Grass and Flowers messed with how we were originally planning on implementing the navmesh. Since we would regenerate it every time it was built. We ended up not regenerating the navmesh because we found out about navmesh obstacles.

One problem that came up when developing the enemy AI was how do we make the enemies deal with the player building themself into a point unreachable by the AI. This was resolved by having the AI check at intervals if they can reach the player. If they can’t then they find the closest constructed object and start attacking it. They will keep attacking the closest objects until they can reach the player again. Gather times were based on FPS, which made it seem slow once built. This was fixed by syncing it to 60 FPS based on Vsync. Trees had a weird bug where if you get too close it won’t let you gather, tagging all LODs helped alleviate the issue. Some angles still act up, on occasion.

What changes were made?

We had originally planned to have bandits as the enemies, but we changed them to ghouls because we had a bunch of assets and animations for them. Originally, we planned on having the player defend a castle, but changed that to the player defending their small camp. We added more upgrade options to the shop such as health potions, mana potions, and spell damage. These were all decided very early in development and did not impact the work process.

What was learned?

We learned a lot about how component-based architecture works with the game development and design process. We learned a lot about how to deal with game updates based on tick or real-time, and how to work with a third-person camera in Unity. We all got a lot of experience with working with Github for a group project and learned how to deal with merge conflicts for Unity games. We learned the importance of having backup branches. We learned that navmesh obstacles can be used to interact with the navmesh without having to rebake it in real-time. We also learned the importance of communication in order to be successful and stay on track when dealing with deadlines.