SOLO PROJECT
UNITY
C# SCRIPT
WINDOWS
ABOUT THIS PROJECT
This is Colony, a settlement building game where you build up a colony on a new planet. Manage resources to construct and unlock new buildings and upgrades that help progress your colony but be careful, colonists can die quite easily...
This is my first full completed project with core mechanics found in settlement building/management games. I created all the assets except some textures for the ground material and some sourced audio. All mechanics was coded in C# which is the first programme language I learned in before switching to Unreal Engine.
MY CONTRIBUTIONS
Top down controls
Building system
Step by step tutorial
Level progression
Upgrades
Economy system
story progression
SUMMARY OF DEVELOPMENT
FIGURING OUT THE BUILDING SYSTEM
For a first time full game I probably should've picked less of a challenge in hindsight but I think I tackled it really well even with my limited knowledge and skills at the time, I learned a basic system of selecting and placing pre determined structures and was able to build and add complexity based on what I needed it to do.
All construction costs resources and some buildings produce resources so I had to make a way of easily adding to the list of buildings the player could construct. I settled on creating a manager actor within the game that held the list of buildings within it, when the player selected a building to create, it grabbed that index from the list and so that meant the buildings data was obtainable before and during placement, this was crucial so that the buildings' functions didn't occur until it was confirmed to have been placed in the game world.
LEARNING HOW ECONOMIES WORKED
Something I found very difficult during the development was ensuring that the economy in the game was balanced, since the player would be working with different resources being spent and produced at different times I needed to constantly change values and costs and production rates every time I added something new to ensure it was balanced and scaled to late game. I implemented a UI bar that held all the info for the economy and what the total resource gain was so that if they were losing resources over time they would know.
Another solution I used to assist with the economy balance was upgrades so that later game colonies were more stable and didn't run into scaling issues, these upgrades are purchasable with resources after a certain level has been reached and improve different statistics throughout the game, some even unlock bonus buildings to help further develop colonies.
FINAL THOUGHTS
Being my first proper game I really think the result is amazing, the complexity of the game is something I didn't think I could achieve and the resource balance turned out better than I anticipated, I cant wait to look back and see how much I have improved!