Corporate Combat

Solo DigiPen project September - December 2021

Unity

Overview

Corporate Combat is a tower defense game with a focus on expression as the primary engagement type. Tower defenses inherently allow plenty of room for customization by choosing which towers to place where, and while Corporate Combat has plenty of gameplay options to choose between for its employee "towers", it also has cosmetic options to make it a unique experience for each player.

Skills Honed

Gameplay Design

C#

Unity

UX

Systems Design

UI

Features

6 classes of towers/employees with various effects.
Scaling costs for various tower upgrades to prevent a single tower from overpowering the others.
Visual customization of all towers through player choice of suit or head for each.
A risk reward element from investments in the stock market.
Expression engagement concept maintained throughout 7 engaging yet easy levels of gameplay

Design Work

Nailing the expression engagement type

When I started this project, I thought that merely having a tower defense would be enough to get people to engage with the game through expression. I learned that there are inherently many strategic decisions in a tower defense, including the location of various types of towers.

Differentiating Strategy from Expression

As I playtested the game, it became clear that players weren't able to win with whatever items they selected. Players felt like they could not express themselves, the point of the game, and instead opted to go for primarily strategy-based options. It wasn't simply a matter of game balance. Recognizing this, I added more customization elements that had no effect on the gameplay, letting players customize the heads and suits of the employees. This quickly became the favorite part of the game for playtesters, as they remembered the theming and customization over the fairly commonplace tower defense gameplay. After that, I focused on making the game very easy enabling all players to focus on the primary engagement type, the original objective of the project.

UX Feedback

The customization features of all of the employee
towers presented a new problem. Because of the ability to fully change a tower's appearance, there was now limited identification feedback differentiating the 6 gameplay classes. The only visual indicator which couldn't be changed was the background color behind each of images of the towers.

While players could identify an employee/tower by clicking it to see the employee's name and stats, I wanted more immediate visual and auditory indicators. Since the game was made with very simple public domain art assets, I changed the fired projectiles of each, making them easier to distinguish and more intuitive to the player. Each tower type had added effects to emphasize their unique character qualities as follows:

Identifiers

All other towers display stars

Dollar signs over their victims

Enemy tint change
Visibly slower movement

Multiple projectiles
including auditory cues

A larger projectile

A very weak sound
No visual effect

Unique Quality

Boost power of all other towers

Produce more cash when
they defeat an enemy

Slow down enemies

Fire multiple projectiles

Slowly do big damage

No notable effects

Character

Managers

Bankers

Cold Callers

Executives

Lawyers

Unpaid Interns

Post Mortem

Things that went right:

Players greatly enjoyed the corporate theming of the project.
The expression elements of the game were very engaging to players and allowed them to have fun customizing their towers.
The non-cosmetic features of the towers proved very engaging to players for the game's brief 10 minute duration.

I made this game's many menus without using the unity UI features, and used unity scripts to simulate menus rather than the way Unity intended it. Due to this, click hitboxes annoyingly appeared over or under other objects, nearly spelling disaster for the project. Time constraints prevented my rework of those elements.
The movement speed of projectiles and enemies was originally input in such a way that these speeds varied based on computer performance. This problem required much reworking to fix.
I might have over-compensated for the high difficulty of most of the game. For a 10-minute experience, however, I've found that too easy is generally better than too hard.

I learned the importance of getting core systems firmly established as quickly as possible so that you don't have to keep applying bandaid fixes to things later in development. Problems with things built on a flimsy base can and will pile up during development.
Allowing players to express themselves through gameplay strategies is a very different engagement type than letting them express themselves through cosmetic means. These two cannot substitute for each other.

Things that went wrong:

What I've learned from this experience: