“Play as Rigolain, a dwarf-engineer, ready for action in the heart of battle ! Use your blunderbuss and a variety of traps to defeat the stone golems, and grab their crystals !”
- Genre : Action / Tower defense
- Game time : 30 minutes to 1 hour
- Langage : English
- Engine : Unreal Engine 5
About the game
Dwarfender is an action tower defense game I made in my 1st year of Game studies. It’s available online for free.
The game follows the adventure of Rigolain, the dwarf-engineer, who is quietly mining crystals underground when suddenly… A wave of golem awakes from their slumber and attacks the cargo of crystals ! Thanks to his traps and his trusty blunderbuss, Rigolain will be able to defend his booty and fend off the horde !
Our main inspiration was the game “Orcs must die!” (2011 – Robot Entertainment).
Study framework
As part of my studies at Objectif 3D at the end of my 1st year, we had to make a game with half the class over a 3-month period :
- 1 month of pre-prod, on which we researched and tested different games, and created a first prototype using blueprint code on Unreal Engine.
- 2 months of prod, in which the programmers joined our team, taking over what we’d created beforehand to optimize the game and its functionalities via C++ code.
We’ve had some difficulties in the production department, and we haven’t been able to get the game online in time, so I’ve invested more time with a few volunteers from the team to fix bugs and balance the game.
My role on the team
I held the role of Game Designer within the team, more specifically in charge of the game design document, one-page documents on game mechanics or other elements such as menu hierarchy, level design and game balancing.
About level design, I was commissioned to design several levels, each presenting a different game mechanic, except for the tutorial and the final level. Each level was first designed on paper, to give a first iteration of intentions and scale. Once all this had been communicated to the team, I switched to the Unreal Engine to create the blocking, a functional version of the level without the graphical assets.
Given the limitations in terms of graphics and the short production schedule, we were only able to complete 3 of the 5 levels on the final product. However, this first experience of working together on a game was very gratifying!
Visual of one of the project’s one-page documents
Images
