Jakub Petr | Game Designer
King of the hill
About project
King of the hill is a twin stick jukebox project in the Godot game engine, where the player is trying to protect the hill area from the oncoming waves of enemies using his lightning weapon..
This game was a second year project that I worked on for 8 weeks. This project also serves as my introduction into the Godot game engine.
On this project I was both the game designer and technical designer, implementing the weapon, gamemode and the enemy.
Weapon
The weapon in my king of the hill game is a lightning strike from the player that after hitting the first enemy, searches and hits the next closest target, repeating this process 5 at least times or until the lightning chain reaches maximum length. This lightning weapon is the core feature of the game that all other features revolve around and support and also the first feature that I designed for this game.
This weapon was meant to give the player a feeling of power when fighting against large hordes of enemies.
The initial shot from the player is a simple raycast in the direction the player is facing. The subsequent searching or enemies is done through a number of raycasts in a circular pattern originating from the enemy that was hit. This searching logic was made into a function that is called whenever a new target needs to be found. The density of the raycast was optimized for performance, but still is high enough to detect all possible enemies.
Gamemode
As the name implies the gamemode is a king of the hill, where the state of the hill does not change until all opponents leave the designated area and the hill itself moves around the level.
There were a couple design intents for this gamemode. Firstly the intent for the gamemode itself was to pressure the player into a confrontation with large groups of enemies and have the player utilize the weapon he was given. Second the intent behind the movement of the hill was to prevent the player from a addapting a "camping" playstyte where they would find the most suitable position for themselves and not leave.
Take-aways
I should have tested my game with other people much sooner and not wait for all of the features to be finished. I was scared that people would not get the full picture of the game without all of the features completed, but now realize that its never too early to test and gather feedback from people.
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One of the greatest take-aways from this project is the knowledge of a new game engine and the ability to learn a new engine with its own language in the span of a few weeks.
Enemy
The enemy that I have created is a quite simple dual state enemy with melee attacks. The two states are the fast moving state and the slow moving state. The enemy swaps from the first state to the second after recieving damage from the player. Since the gamemode is all about capturing the hill area, the enemy also prioritizes taking over the hill whenever it is under the players control. This enemy is meant to work in large numbers and not as an individual.
The main intent behind this enemy was to create something that would work well in large numbers and with that support the gameplay of the weapon and the gamemode. With the two states I also wanted to have a more interesting way that the player prioritizes which enemies to shoot first.
