Get Off My Lawn!
| Play | GitHub |
About
A tower defense style game where you play as an old man trying to keep kids off of his lawn. If too many kids get to your house you lose! It can be played by up to 16 players, but you can only submit a high score in singleplayer. Made in a team of 5 for Global Game Jam 2019.
My Contribution:
Responsible for programming and balancing difficulty.
Designed the behavior for the kids.
Implemented art and audio.
Development:
The theme for this year's jam was "What home means to you", and there's nothing more homely than grandpa keeping them young'uns off his perfectly manicured lawn.
In this game, kids come from the right and try to make it to your house on the left, and if your property loses all of its health you lose. You can send kids running back by hitting them with your cane or playing music from the phonographs that periodically spawn. Each wave has more and faster kids than the last, making the difficulty increase over time.
One of the problems I ran into is that at some point, the kids become so fast that it's impossible to defend your house with your cane and have to rely on the phonographs powerups. Since they spawn on a timer, the optimal strategy is to wait as long as you can at the beginning so as many phonographs as possible spawn. This incentivizes the player to play in a very boring way in order to succeed in getting a high score.
We had more features planned, like more powerups and different types of kids that could appear as the player gets further in the game. This project taught me the importance of scoping small because unfortunately some of our team members had to leave midway through. The original build that I submitted had a pretty major bug that broke the difficulty, and that could have been spotted with more time to playtest.
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