Bastion Heart · Unity · Tower Defence · System Design

Bastion Heart

An overview of my systems heavy tower defence game!

Unity C# Player Progression Systems Dialogue Systems Cloud
Full Demo Trailer

Try the demo on Steam!

Concept & Inspiration

Having a smaller scope in mind after a major project like Fateful Fragments, I set my sites on a product targeted toward a niche audience. A tower defence game with heavy gameplay systems, inspired by the widely popular game Arknights.

Team

I would be the sole designer and programmer for this game. I would contract the following roles out:

Design Goals & Challenges

Goals

  • Simple but strong core gameplay loop to maintain player flow state
  • Tower defence mechanics with some systems layered on top
  • Skill Trees with branching paths for player expression
  • Player progression systems such as experience, unit levels, and equipment
  • Robust cloud saving to prevent basic file cheating with offline fallback option

Challenges

  • Skill Tree's that feel impactful
  • Player progression systems such as experience, unit levels, and equipment
  • Creating unique unit identity for every unit in the game
  • Map Design that teaches lessons without being over-punishing
  • Designing UI that is scalable to multiple platforms
  • Balancing interconnected systems such as unit stat scaling(across three tiers), equipment, and skill trees

Tools & Technologies

Systems Design - Skill Trees

I wanted to pursue some sort of skill tree system and equipment system that allowed for player expression.

I begun by using a simple DAG (Directed Acyclic Graph) design. This was super easy to program as basically every node just needed to check if its parent was leveled to allow it to be levelable as well. And of course there was only 1 root node, so it had no parents.

Each unit would have three paths to go down. Typically choosing attack, attack speed, or utility such as health and damage reduction. The middle of the tree would contain a special passive always active, and the bottom node would of course be an ultimate change node.

I had great feedback on this system; However I felt that the three paths felt boring and there wasn't much innovation I could do to make each individual node feel impactful. So I decided to take a look at what a more popular game did.

Elder Scrolls incorported images, and graphs with multiple paths in them. I wanted something visually appealing and that TRUELY allowed player choice. Not a one directional psuedo choice.

Here's what I ended up creating:

This new style allowed a wider variety of builds and felt more unit-specific. Just what I wanted.

Upon investing enough points in a unit, you are also prompted with a choice to upgrade your passive or ultimate abilities. Check these out:

Systems Design - Equipment System

This system was a lot easier to work with. I really just needed a front-end display that made sense to players paired with the simple application of stats visually in UI and "physically" inside of the game.

Each unit would have six slots, which really were just integer arrays on the backend. Easy to track, alter, and very scalable. I then would divide items into each category and make serializable objects for them.

I added a popout when players clicked on a UI equipment slot as seen here. It's a simple scrollview UI populated with items from that given category at runtime. Hovering over any specific item also shows stats in the side panel for ONLY that item until exiting that hover. All cumulative item stat changes are displayed on that side panel.

Lastly, I present this information in a digestible manner on the final total stat panel on the left side of my unit UI. You can see base stats of a unit, see stat gains from items or skills via mouse hover tooltip popups.

Player feedback has been great! Players understand what items and skill are doing to their units stats in an easily understood format.

Here's a quick peek at the shop since we're talking equipment:

Screenshots


Thanks for checking out some of my systems design and Bastion Hearts! Maybe try the demo?

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