Pathway - 6/5/2024-6/10/2024
Pre Production
Description
This game was made for a school project in 2024, and I'm writing this blog in the year 2026, so details may be fuzzy. I have no original notes for this game; this game was only made in 5 days. The purpose of the creation of the game was to show what you have learned from that school year.
Pathway is a tower defense game where the path the enemies take randomly generates every single round. After killing an enemy, there is a chance you get 1/4 items. The first item was a path tile. This path tile allows you to place the other 3 items. Item 2 was a cannon, which shot at nearby enemies with an adaptive fire rate that changed after every single round. Item 3 was a booster; when placing this booster next to cannons, it would boost the stats of the cannons. Item 4 was a telephone pole, this shot lightning at enemies, killing them in one shot.
My Contribution
I made this entire game, the sound effects, models, UI (main menu, placement menu, timer, wave), and coded the whole game.
Post Production
Game Links
Problems & Failures
This game had a lot of issues, and that's to be expected from a person with only about 10 months of experience in Unity, and also for a game to only be made in 5 days.
The largest issue was that the cannons would stop shooting even if an enemy was close; this wasn't infrequent, however, you could go a whole game without this happening to you
A large issue that nobody figured out about this game was the fact the booster would boost cannons, which wasn't close to if you hovered over a tile, while having the booster selected.
There was an issue with the telephone pole; it would just not shoot. Most of the time, checking the console while playing the game, you can actually see a long list of "Object Reference not set to an instance of an object" errors, and it's reasonable to assume those errors are coming from the Telephone poles.
More recently playing the game, I actually noticed another issue, it's the same idea with the booster hovering; however, this is with the cannons, if you hover over an empty tile with the cannon selected, it would fire at nearby enemies even though visually there was nothing there.
Fixes & Improvements
If I were to remake this game, I'd be able to do a much better job if I only had 5 days, this in its current state would only take about a day to make, I would fix all the issues with the cannon, and booster, telephone pole, I would also implement a better system for the progression of the game, currently the items you can place down where way to strong at the start, then around wave 5, the enemies where way to strong, I was only about to get to wave 11 off 100% luck, before the enemies just started overthrowing all my cannons.
I would also implement a better pathfinding algorithm, the path finding algorithm was pretty bad, it was an attempt at the A-start algorithm, but it had flaws, if you gained a lot of path pieces you could actually break the game, the path finding algorithm also would not work sometimes if you had a bunch of path tiles placed, if it couldn't find a path after I believe 50 attempts, it would just break as well.
Visually, the game was fine, the models looked a little bit weird, and there was no post-processing. I did have moving waves as a background; I made a custom shader for this, and there was no lighting on the waves. If I remake this game, I'd probably try to stick to a theme. It felt a little disjointed, it didn't really make sense, and because of the lack of post-processing, the game just looked dull.
The music was very repetitive, I would make a new theme track for the game, I believe the original one was only about 15 seconds, and was just looping the whole time, it got very annoying very fast, however the sound effects where pretty decent, they also go repetitive, but if I remake the game I would change the pitch and volume every time they where played, to give it a little bit of randomness.
What I learned
Since I'm writing this blog is 2026 and the game was made in 2024, it's hard to recall exactly what I learned, however based on the context, and with this game only being made in 5 days, I learned I was actually able to make a full game in a very short amount of time, I also believe during this time I had just started learning blender, and put some of those still to use.
Personal Reflection
I actually think this was one of the better games I've made, despite it not having good models, or good sound, and a lot of broken mechanics, I actually do believe the idea of this game was pretty decent, and had some replicability, in my more recent projects I have been working on, the scope of the games has been pretty large, and made me lost interest or get burnt out from working on them. That's something that didn't happen with this game. I took two ideas, tower defense and RNG, and combined them to make a simple game.
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