Simeon Acker
123-456-7890
Last Robot
The Rookies 2017 - Game of the Year Finalist
All aspects of game independently created
Last Robot is a procedural 3D tower defense where you capture territory, build structures, and battle monsters.
This game tells the tale of the last surviving robot in a world once made from machines. Beneath the earth, hordes of fierce creatures grew and have now risen to take the world for their own.
The land is almost entirely overrun by nature, and you, a military construction drone, must fight against all odds to restore power to machinekind.
Unity 3D, Maya, Photoshop
There were many considerations in the development of this system. The game itself plays like a 3D tower defense where your main character can build structures and defenses to fend off hostile creatures as he explores the world. The secondary purpose of building structures is to “tame” the world, which has become chaotic. The parts of the environment that you “tame” will no longer change as long as you retain control of them. This being the case, I had to communicate to the grid where the player had built structures so it would know where it could and could not terraform.
This game's uniqueness lies in a procedure I developed which allows the earth to terraform itself constantly, turning the landscape into a chaotic and ever-changing maze.
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This constant transformation relies on a system where a grid of a few hundred hexagonal sections will procedurally check against certain environmental factors and then terraform accordingly.
Ballista
Gun Turret
AI Core Module
Fortified Wall
In addition to the changing hexagonal terrain, environmental props were added that would grow randomly from the ground to add visual interest. In these areas of the grid, I had to supersede the hexagons’ terraform command so as to avoid overlap with the new terrain objects.
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The procedurally generated terrain also randomly chooses patterns to form as hexes rise and fall to create new obstacles, while never exceeding a certain density that would disallow movement of characters throughout the world.
The hostile creatures your hero encounters emerge from habitats around the environment and will seek you out when you invade their territory. Therefore, I had to communicate to each of the enemies the current positions of the constantly moving environment hexes so they could correctly pathfind around them.
Overall, this procedurally changing landscape has to take into account the main character's position and actions, the behaviors of AI units, the random generation of other environmental features, the visual interest of what was being created, and the shape of the entire explorable environment.
