Kamikaze (2016)
Team project (4 designers + 1 Artist)
Tower defense game
Time: 5 months
OVERVIEW
A classic tower defense game where you build and place both towers and samurai, to defend your village from foreign invaders. Kamikaze also has a heavy emphasis on resource management, more so than casual tower defense games, as the player is forced to face empathy conundrums.
Kamikaze focuses on realistic battles. The idea is to provide the player with an insight into the effects of war, the loss of both life and property. And how no matter what happens you must keep on fighting, if not for yourself then for the fallen. We wish to make the player feel like a leader, to strategize like a commander would, to manage their resources and bear the responsibility of winning a war, as well as the burden of losing the lives of innocent civilians. At the conclusion we wish to show that in reality, no one truly wins in a war.
PLOT
Kamikaze is based in feudal Japan depicting Kublai Khan’s attack on Japan in 1274 AD and all the brave Samurai that stood in his way. Thousands of lives were lost on both sides, during the
battle that followed. The survivors from the Mongol army retreated back to their ships, but they weren’t very fortunate. They were greeted by the ‘kamikaze,’ or the typhoon. By the morning,
there were no survivors.
MY ROLE
Scripting
I did all the scripting for this project using the visual scripting features of the Stencyl game engine. The engine though severely limited was a great introductory foray into logic gates.
Game Design
We were tasked with producing two concepts on the theme of feudal Japan. We came up with two concepts one focusing on a more magical setting and one on a realistic setting. The realistic setting (proposed by me and a fellow designer) was chosen by our lead trainer as he liked the idea of an empathetic challenge alongside classical logic challenges . I was the the resident "fact checker" who made sure the project was as historically accurate as possible. I also helped in game balancing.
