Pollinator, Flower Defense - It's Almost a Game!

My team has been working hard on our game "Pollinator, Flower Defense" for the Abertay Game Development Society, and it's paying off. It almost feels like a real game, now.

Concept art of the play field

 Here's a list of the features added this week:

• Multiple ants
• Multiple bees
• Health bars for ants, bees, and the hive.
• Bee attacks injure ants
• Ants die when their HP reaches 0
• Ants that reach the hive die, but damage the hive.
• Bees are draggable, and can be moved around the field of play

This is all well and good, but there are still a lot of things that need work. For example, bee movement has no constraints right now, and they still attack while being dragged.

The worker ant, easiest of enemies

In the next week, I'm hoping to get the following set up:

• Some kind of level loader which spawns ants at set intervals
• Different kinds of ants (damage, speed, and health can already be customized)
• Constraints on bee movement as designed by game designer
• Integrating new art assets

After that, we still have some other basic features to implement:

• Pollen and Seed generation
• Planting flowers
• Creating new bees
• Animations

The basic starting bee unit

Finally, I'm hoping we'll be able to reach some of our stretch goals:

• Nectar occasionally generated from flowers
• Nectar used for tech upgrades
• Multiple levels
• Multiple enemy types (beyond just base stat changes - for example, grasshoppers that jump over flowers)
• Multiple bee types (again, beyond just base stat changes)

I think it's going very well, and we'll definitely have at least some kind of base game completed by the end of the semester.

The soldier ant, slightly stronger and able to damage bees that come near

From now on, I plan to have a working prototype posted online at all times, updated each week for our weekly GDS demo. I'll post here each week after our GDS meetings and give my readers an update on our progress and overview of the new demo's features.

Here's this week's demo: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/11838203/Pollinator/Demo02.zip

This week it's a download, but I'll use Unity web player in the future.

Enjoy!