Melon Smash | RanaJahani

Melon Smash 2D Tower Defense | 2020

About

Genre: 2D Tower Defense with only one tower

Softwares: Game Dev: Unity, Artwork: Adobe Photoshop, Sound FX: FL Studio

Project Type: Team Project, Remotely

Development Time: 4 weeks with three iterations for paper and digital prototypes.

Team Members: Yang Hu, Rana Jahani, Viraj Shirodkar, Afraz Zackria, Daviti Tsintsadze, Jai Dodechani

My Role: Game Designer, Level Designer, Artist
My Responsibilities:

Collaborated in designing game mechanics and game system
- Balanced the combat system - the weapons and enemies characteristics
Designed characters, objects, and sprite sheets of each character and objects’ state
Designed the UI and the tutorial for controls

Game Concept

Melon Smash has the characteristics of a tower-defense game with just one tower (player). It's about a farmer trying to save his precious pumpkin from the incoming waves of vermin that want to get to it. The farmer can keep the vermin away by moving around the map, harvesting his melons and throwing them at the vermin to save his pumpkin. There are two different types of melons and two types of vermin with different characteristics that would attack the farm in multiple waves.

Prototyping Strategies

Project Risks

Risk of failing to code the mechanics by the deadline
Risk of failing to balance the enemy waves with the weapons system
Risk of failing to balance the player character movement speed with the waves of enemies
Risk of failing to create the ideal ascending flow and the game resulting in being too imbalanced – too easy or too complex
Risk of failing to navigate the game design team effectively and not everyone taking part in the overall process

Intentions

Create flawless mechanics of moving, pick up, throwing, and kicking for the player character
Create the system of challenge upgrading and weapon / level ups in order to keep the player in the flow
Create visually interesting characters, map layout, and objects
Create the right game “feel” emerging from the balanced MDA of the game
Maintain efficient work distribution and communication inside the team

Risk Mitigation

First, have a playable level; focus on programming the characters actions with primitive shapes as placeholder,
While the work on game narrative, design, and art continue simultaneously.
After building the basic character movement, enemy behavior and melon system for the firs level, start balancing and tuning the game systems
Set up melon farms on the map so that players need to run through the map to collect different melons
Eliminate the mechanic of planting and watering the plants

Project Plan

Come up with a basic design for the map, melons (weapons), vermin (hostile NPCs), and waves of attack in collaboration with programmers, visual artist, narrative writer, and sound designer.
Figure out the greatest risks in our design.
Build prototypes that mitigate those risks.
Test the prototypes by playtesting the game (in 3 phases).
Come up with a more detailed design based on what we have learned after each playtest
Return to step 2 for each iteration

Gameplay

The objective of the game is to survive all the waves of hostile enemy before the pumpkin gets completely damaged. If enough vermin reach the pumpkin and dig in it, then the game is lost. There are two waves of vermin; in the first wave, the Green Caterpillars will try to reach the pumpkin, and in the second wave, the more aggressive Purple Worms will also try to find their way to the pumpkin.

Click on the gallery to see more pictures of the farmer

Features

Melons

Two types of melons:

Yellow Melon - Medium Damage, Medium Range of Throw
Watermelon - High Damage, Short Range of Throw

Vermin

Two types of vermin:

Green Caterpillar - Moves slowly introduced in the first wave
Purple Worm - Moves fast and introduced in the second wave

Character Actions

The farmer is trying to save his precious pumpkin from the incoming waves of vermin. He can:

Move around his farm
Pick-up melons
Throw melons at the vermin
Kick the vermin away with a cooldown state.

Maps

Map layouts and the location of the farms, pumpkin and the paths have gone through multiple iterations to deliver the intended player experience and yet keep the player in the flow state - not too easy or too challenging.

Pumpkin

If the vermin reach the pumpkin, they dig in and if it's eaten completely, the game is over.

The holes on the pumpkin represent the damage on it as a feedback to the player.

Player Experience

Strategizing

Since there would be different melons and vermin with different attributes, the player needs to decide strategically which melon (weapon) to use on specific vermin, and which stack to use later. Providing players with different weapons and interactable objects not only helped players ability to overcome challenges, but also added more meaning to player's choices since they need to adopt different strategies during the gameplay.

Planning My Actions

Tension

Player struggles with being fast enough to prevent vermin from reaching the bottom of the farm where his pumpkin is, which spice up the challenges in the game. The randomness in growing melons in each farm and the amount and speed of the vermin in each wave adds to the tension in the game.

The tension resonates with the narrative and the theme of the game - the urgency to save the pumpkin.

Challenge

As after each wave game gets gradually harder, the vermin are harder to kill and have different characteristics. So, improving skill should meet more hard challenges. We also try to balance the game mechanics and characteristics of weapons, upgrades, level ups in correspondence to the challenge getting harder. In order to ensure that we will try not to have only positive or negative feedback loops for the player, and generally keep the game both balanced and symmetrical.

Playtesting and Iterations

Overall, we iterated on designing the game 3 times.
After each phase of prototyping the game, we playtested the game to observe players behavior during gameplay such as the methods they use to defeat hostile NPCs, how they use melons, if they understand the rules of the game, and if there are issues with the waves of vermin. We also collected the feedback we received from the players.
Then, we analyzed the result of the playtests in the team and reiterated the prototype based on the players feedback and our design intentions for player experience.

Problem: Not Enough Feedback

One of the problems that we observed during the first playtest, was that players were confused about the consequences of their actions.

Solution: Add Visual and Sound Effects

We decided to find ways to give more feedback to the players and polish the feeling of the game. We incorporated visual effects for when melons are thrown at the enemies and smashed

We also added visual effects for the kick mechanic:

Additionally, we added both sound effect and visual effect when the pumpkin is eaten by the worms:

Animation for farmer's walking and throwing states and the worms' walking and death state were added to polish the game and provide more visual feedback: