Inception

Barnstorm was a project born out of one silly concept: "food = ammo". After a bit of thought about the idea, we decided on a making it into a couch co-op tower defense game , with the main mechanic being farming and hauling food towards turrets. We wrote our design for the game down in this (semi out-of-date) document and got to work not too long after.

Developement

This project moved at a steady pace from beginning to end. I personally earned a lot of experience with game-feel and input (which is sort-of my specialty). This was also my first time designing for a gamepad, and i gained a lot of insight in how to design intuitive and comfortable controls for them. I also made sure that the in-game player felt responsive and snappy.

Besides that i was responsible for implementing the crop systems (tilling, planting, harvesting). I used the existing Unity tilemaps for these, but i've learned that next time i should make something more custom.

We ended up displaying this game at our school's open house event. After which we worked on it for another month or so with the intention of releasing on Steam, but we were met with the reality that our game just wasn't that fun. We all had different directions we wanted to steer the game in to try and solve this, but the project eventually fizzled out.

Reflection

In general i would summarize this project as a lesson in prototyping for us. We were far too concerned with content and features at the start of developement, neglecting the core gameplay of the game. Adding to this, all three of us are the kind of developers who just have to program everything right the first time. Expectedly, this makes developement take longer, and makes changing the game concept harder. I've become a little less scared of making bad code afterwards; sometimes quick-and-dirty is just the way to go. Aside from that, we also did not set any milestones between start of developement and release, causing us to have no idea what our game played like until it was pretty much done.

Team

This game was made with the help of two good friends who are talented programmers in their own right, they are:

Max Coppen

Milan Bonten