IKilla
School - Jan 2019 – May 2019
Ikilla takes inspiration from old arcade games, where the goal is to get a high score. You play as a tank, surrounded by an unstoppable horde of zombies. As time progresses, the horde of zombies attacking the tank increase, but not all hope is lost as the tank can upgrade itself from a large variety of power-ups. After each wave, the tank is given three choices from a total of sixteen power-ups. When the player loses, they are then allowed to enter their initials and have their score saved to a local leaderboard where they can compete with other scores.
Systems
When I created the character controller, one of the most difficult challenges to overcome was creating a control scheme that was easy to pick up and made sense to control the tank. After playtesting many different control schemes, I chose to use the one where the tank would go in the inputted direction. For example, if left is inputted, the tank would turn, so it faces the left side of the screen and starts moving forward.
I also created a local leaderboard and the UI to view it in the game. Much of the UI used for the leaderboard was also reused to make the rest of the game's UI. The leaderboard info is saved to the computer using a custom format, so that if anyone were to open the file, they would understand it.
Particles
The particle system I made for IKilla can be broken down into three parts, the particle, spawner, and manager. Multiple spawners can be placed on a level and can be told to watch a variable for when to spawn particles. The particles are then moved to the manager, whose sole job is to update the particles and remove them. Both the manager and spawner could work with any particle with no change to the code. The particles could then be programmed to have custom behaviors, like the green dots that fly to the score counter, or dust clouds behind the tank and zombies.