Daniel Lye's Portfolio

Conceptualisation Phase

My friend and I had a vision to make a game where Sci-Fi characters would clash with Fantasy characters in a Fantasy setting. We drew references from popular games like World of Warcraft and Kingdom Rush for our art direction.

Kingdom Rush (left) and World of Warcraft (right) have a really solid medieval fantasy artstyle that we were really fond of.

The project was set to be on the mobile platform, and so we had the idea of increasing player involvement by allowing them to fight enemies directly with their own fingers. This would set the game apart from other games which would typically only allow players to fight enemies by summoning troops.

Plants vs. Zombies (left) and The Battle Cats (right) are both games that allow players to summon troops to fight against enemy troops.

Prototyping Phase

We started by first laying down the goal of the player. We had intended for the enemy to be self-destructive robots that the players had to defend against.
We had two options with regards to that:

1) Players have to protect a castle, a fort, or a structure against the robots.

2) Players have to protect a wall keeping the innocent townspeople safe against the robots.

Through several rounds of playtesting, we decided to stick with the first option, as protecting a structure seemed to motivate the players more compared to merely protecting the walls of a structure. It was also around the time when we had gotten to experiment with using walls that we had also started to implement various enemy types in order to make the game more challenging and also break the monotony of the gameplay.

We experimented with letting the players protect either a structure (top) or a wall (bottom). We choose to use structures in the end.

We tried to make the gameplay deeper with more complex mechanics, and had also experimented with boss fights, but in the end we chose to focus on a narrower selection of enemy types in order to meet the project's deadline.

We decided to focus on just four enemy types: Bot, ScoutBot, KnightBot, and TankBot.

As development of the game progressed further, we decided to change the player's character from a human to an elf to enhance the fantasy theme of the setting. We also shifted the player's character position and angle such that she would appear physically closer to the player, which helped with creating an immersive experience.

We then also gave the players three different magic abilities to further diversify the gameplay. One ability would increase their damage, another would push the enemy back, and another one would slow the enemy down drastically.

Lana the Elven Archer (bottom left) fending off invading Bots.

In the pursuit of increased immersiveness for the players, we also made the Main Menu fully integrated into the game's theme and setting, drawing references from games like Blizzard Entertainment's Hearthstone.

The Main Menu's old design (left) versus the revamped design (right). The different options in the Main Menu were now represented by the different elements in the game: The bulletin board would bring players to the level selection screen, the wanted posters are actually the Credits, etc.

End Product

As we continued polishing what had been laid down during the Prototyping phase, we were ultimately able to produce a game that both my friend and I were really satisfied with. Below are some screenshots of the game:

An auto-sidescrolling screensaver right before the actual Main Menu.

The revamped Main Menu. Words were added to the various menu elements to improve their clarity and usability.

The ability icons (bottom right) were made smaller and into circles to reduce clutter. The graphics were also updated to be of a higher quality.

ABotcalypse was my first experience working in a team, and I had really learnt a lot from it. Special thanks to Ang Wei Feng, ABotcalypse's programmer, who made this project possible.

Check out Wei Feng's portfolio here!