Additive Spectrum

The Project

A HTC Vive wave defence game. Created over 2 weeks for ‘Rainbow Jam 2016’.

My Role

Programmer / Designer on a team of two.

Project Description

Three islands sit at points of a triangle, each with a wall at the back facing inwards. Enemies spawn at the centre of the triangle and try to demolish the walls on each island. The player must teleport between islands, smashing enemies to protect their walls as well as using bricks dropped by the enemies to repair the walls.

My Contribution

The team comprised of me and another programmer. We designed the game together and shared programming responsibilities. Key features I implemented:

Wall system – Enemies would randomly select a brick in one of the three walls to target. When a brick is hit it is destroyed, leaving a gap in the wall. This gap can be repaired by placing a brick which has been dropped by an enemy back into the wall.
In scene UI – To give players a clear idea of how many bricks are left in each wall, each island has a feed into the centre of the triangle, which links to a bar indicating the health of the wall, so the player can see by looking into the centre how full each wall is, and which is a priority to defend.
Game state – When any one wall becomes significantly more damaged than the others, the game is over.

Learning Outcomes

This was the first VR game I worked on, which presented some interesting challenges with regard to gameplay design. It taught me a lot about how to work with locomotion and how much you get the player to move.