Game Basic Information

Summary

In the insect world, survival is a contest of brutality where only the strongest survive. For an ant colony to survive, it must defend itself against vicious invading insects who threaten its existence. And war is hell... Anthell. During the day, dig for resources and shape your anthill into the ultimate fortress. When night falls, command your combat-ants to victory and defend the queen. How long can you last?

Anthell is primarily based on 2D colony management games like Oxygen Not Included and Dwarf Fortress, where the objective is to grow and expand your colony while surviving as long as you can. Anthell uses a similar “invasion” element from Dwarf Fortress where you defend your colony against enemies every night while gathering resources during the day.

Gameplay Explanation

During the day, your main priority should be to collect resources so you can afford stronger ants to defend your queen from the first wave. Command your workers to dig some stone first, so you can use your starting cash to purchase a Carpenter Ant. Using the Carpenter, you can dig wood and other blocks faster. Make a longer path to the queen as well, and try to move her deeper to ensure better protection for her. When night falls, your ants will automatically attack nearby insects (and keep following and attacking them until they are dead) if they have no tasks assigned to them. Position them near areas where insects will pass through, or command them to attack directly, to ensure none are allowed to pass. Repeat this basic loop until you build up more and more resources and cash, so you can afford the stronger ants. Digging deeper and further to the left and right yields more valuable resources! Also, do make sure to remember ants can have multiple tasks assigned to them, and they will complete the sequentially.

(Left mouse button) If clicking on an ant, this selects that ant. If an ant is selected, if you click a block this will tell that ant to dig that block and if you click an insect it will attack that insect; if you click an empty tile with a resource selected it will tell that ant to build that resoruce there and with no resource selected the ant will simply move there. (WASD) Move camera (Scroll wheel) Zoom camera in/out (E) Open/close buy menu (1234) Select resource (X) Deselect selected ant and resource

Note: an exploit exists where you can make it unreachable to get to the queen via building, causing the enemies to not be able to attack her. A planned dig functionality for the enemies was planned to patch this.

Main Roles

Your goal is to relate the work of your role and sub-role in terms of the content of the course. Please look at the role sections below for specific instructions for each role.

Below is a template for you to highlight items of your work. These provide the evidence needed for your work to be evaluated. Try to have at least 4 such descriptions. They will be assessed on the quality of the underlying system and how they are linked to course content.

Short Description - Long description of your work item that includes how it is relevant to topics discussed in class. link to evidence in your repository

Here is an example:
Procedural Terrain - The background of the game consists of procedurally-generated terrain that is produced with Perlin noise. This terrain can be modified by the game at run-time via a call to its script methods. The intent is to allow the player to modify the terrain. This system is based on the component design pattern and the procedural content generation portions of the course. The PCG terrain generation script.

You should replay any bold text with your relevant information. Liberally use the template when necessary and appropriate.

Producer

As producer, I focused a lot on trying to communicate what needs to get done for my vision to come true, and organizing and communicating that to the team. I had some difficulties with this since we didn't meet in person much, but I found technology really useful for this. I made a [Trello] (https://trello.com/invite/b/E3Ah5fS1/ATTI997f6243f679bfd1f3ced6899d87f8583320C8F1/anthell), which helped with assigning tasks, and multiple concept documents to try to get everybody on the same page: Early design document, Early codebase plan, and Resources and costs. I also scheduled meetings through Discord and messaged people to check up on their tasks and ask if they needed help or had any questions.

User Interface

Responsibilities: My responsibilites as user interface was to create the main menu and in game menus that allow the player to interact with several game mechanics. This included:

Main Menu
Buy Menu
Resource Counters

Successes: Some successes I found while creating the UI was mapping all the buttons to their corresponding function. This was done in two ways, the first was the transition buttons, that switched the menu from one menu/information to another, this was done in the scene with the easy to use button events. The other way was through a menu manager script that held all the relevant functions the buttons would do, such as buying player assets or starting the game.

Obstacles: There was a few obstacles at first when I was creating the game. The first obstacle was designing the layout of the UI buttons and texts, where they are placed on the screen, what they would display, and what it would allow the player to do. After trial and error and more insight with the game mechanics, I was able to decided on a layout that would be usefull to the player. Another obstacle was the ui elements not staying in the same positions relative to eachother when the game screen was resized. I had to learn to prevent the misposition of ui elements by comforming them to specific positions that changed with the screen size.

Resource Counters/Buttons - The game has different materials that are collected and can be used to build or buy other assets for the player. Five buttons at the bottom of the screen also keep track of how many of each resource the player has, updating when the player gains or uses one of the resources. The resource counters are buttons allowing the player to choose what material they want to build with. This is similar to exercise 1 with keeping track of resource amounts via the ResourceManager script. ResourceManager Script.

Buy Menu - The game features a buy menu that allows the player to buy different assets in the game, as well as offers an information button for each asset that switches the menu to text showing stats and descriptions of each available asset. Each buy button is mapped to a corresponding buy function in the Shopenu script. I made the script as a framework for easy implementation of all relevant game functions. ShopMenu Script.

Main Menu - The game features an interactive Main Menu screen that has multiple different menus, such as how to play screen with information about different aspects of the screen, and a credits screen. This interface uses buttons to switch between each menu and is also able to start and exit the game via the MainMenu script. MainMenu Script. Ant Descriptions

Movement/Pathfinding

Our game, given that ants can walk on walls, does not use gravity or Unity physics. Instead, our movement relies on the A* Pathfinding Project Pro by Aaron Granberg, which I got on sale a while ago. This asset is very powerful and versatile, and supports a wide range of functions for pathfinding without much difficulty on the user end. The package all relies on the A* GameObject in the scene, which allows you to configure the type of navigation mesh to use. I used a Grid Graph since our game used a tilemap, and setting this up was not too difficult since it auto-generated based on the collision I specified. After that was set up, getting the ants to go where they needed to was as simple as adding a Seeker, AILerp, and Destination Setter, then setting the destination on the destination setter script and enabling movement. One difficulty was making sure the Grid Graph would update as the player placed and broke blocks, but this was handled in the TilemapManager by simply adding these lines, which force the Tilemap Collider to update and then rescans the graph: TilemapManager

Animation and Visuals

For our Animations and Visuals, we used the following assets:

Insect Enemies Ants and Bugs Rocky Grass Tileset Pixel Valley Pixel Art Pack for UI Tileset Weapon Pack Guns

Since spriting wasn't an option for us, we used these assets to bring our game world to life.

Environment - For our environment which includes the ground and background we used a couple assets. The Rocky Grass Tileset and the Pixel art nature tiles were used for the underground area, making up most of the playable area. These tiles could be were not just for decoration, they also were also part of our gameplay mechanics. The ants could dig parts of the playable area to build and create new ants. The Pixel Valley Assets were mainly for the background making the playable area seem more like a place where ants would reside. It being an asset came with the added benefit of being able to cast light to it. This allowed for a changing Day and Night setting using the Universal RP package for 2D lights. The day/night cycle is important, as the day is where you are supposed to build up your resources and defenses while the night is where the enemies come out.

Ants The ants sprites and animations are taken from a pack on itch.io. They serve as the primary player controlled entity that litters our game world. They also hold different types of tools and weapons and that pertains to what type of ant they are. These weapon and tool sprites come from both the Weapon asset pack and the Guorions asset packs. The ants are the primarily controlled player character in the game. Adding guns and tools to the ants was primarily due to the concept of the world as well as highlighting which ant did what.

Enemies For our enemy sprites and animations, we ended up using a free pack we found on itch.io which fit our world. They were other bugs of varying types and they were going to be the main antagonists gunning for the ant queen. They don't have anything special regarding tools, but they can do much of the same as the ants can.

UI Our UI although not really matching the nature-esque world that we have defined is made mostly from assets garnered from the Pixel Art Pack For UI. It was simple and free which allowed us to have a somewhat nice UI without having to make one ourselves.

Input

Two different input types are supported. The first input type is mouse and keyboard. The second input type is touch controls.

Camera Movement - The camera can be moved using WASD or arrow keys if using mouse and keyboard. With touch controls, the camera is moved by touching the left side of the screen, then moving your finger in the direction you want the camera to move in. It basically works like a virtual thumbstick. The further you move your finger, the faster the camera moves. To prevent movement when the player is tapping the screen, there is a deadzone where the player must move their finger greater than that area to move the camera. Since there is no player character to follow, the camera is directly moved with player input. The camera’s position is limited to stay within the game’s map.

	// Mouse + Keyboard controls for camera
	// Camera movement (Note: Camera speed is set within CameraController)
	if (Input.GetAxis("Horizontal") != 0 \|\| Input.GetAxis("Vertical") != 0)
	{
	var moveAmount = new Vector3(Input.GetAxis("Horizontal"), Input.GetAxis("Vertical"), 0.0f);
	cameraObject.GetComponent<CameraController>().MoveCamera(moveAmount);
	}

	// Camera zoom in/out with scroll.
	if (Input.mouseScrollDelta.y != 0)
	{
	cameraObject.GetComponent<CameraController>().ZoomCamera(-Input.mouseScrollDelta.y);
	}

	// Get the coordinates of the tile that the cursor is currently hovering over.
	// Will show a highlight on the tile that the cursor is on.
	mousePosition = Camera.main.ScreenToWorldPoint(Input.mousePosition);
	mouseTilePosition = tiles.LocalToCell(mousePosition);
	tileHighlight.transform.position = tiles.GetCellCenterLocal(mouseTilePosition);

	// Check if clicking on UI to prevent input conflict
	if (Input.touchCount > 0)
	{
	foreach (Touch touch in Input.touches)
	{
	if (EventSystem.current.IsPointerOverGameObject(touch.fingerId))
	{
	uiClicked = true;
	}
	}
	}
	else if (EventSystem.current.IsPointerOverGameObject())
	{
	uiClicked = true;
	}
	else
	{
	uiClicked = false;
	}

	// Open/Close Menu
	if (Input.GetKeyDown(KeyCode.E))
	{
	menuOpen = !menuOpen;
	}
	else if (Input.touchCount == 1)
	{
	TouchOpenCloseMenu();
	}

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ProjectDocument.md

File metadata and controls

Game Basic Information

Summary

Gameplay Explanation

Main Roles

Producer

User Interface

Movement/Pathfinding

Animation and Visuals

Input

Game Logic

Audio

Sub-Roles

Cross-Platform

Gameplay Testing

Narrative Design

Press Kit and Trailer

Game Feel

User Interface 2