About Me:

Hi, I'm Ed. For the past year I have been working on becoming a game developer. It is my passion and motivation to wake up in the morning. I am a full time automotive engineer and only really get to develop during my free time. For the past eight months I have been working on Penguin Siege. When I started this project I did not have any idea what it would become or where it will lead. My only goal was to make a game in 6 months. Before Penguin Siege I created a handful of small scale prototype. I would only spend a month at a time playing with an idea. Penguin Siege was my way to prove to myself that I can hopefully one day be a part of this industry.

The Journey

Development of penguin siege began in February 2020 during early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. I prototyped  a small 2D tower defense with little circle units. There were no animations, no art, no sounds. Just a screen with two dots fighting to the death. At that point I decided to continue with the idea of a 2D defense game simply because it was a proven concept and I simply had to give it my own twist.

I'll mention here that I am by no means an artist, therefore my limitations pushed me towards making simple shapes and animations for units. This is actually where the idea of using cartoon penguins came from. I needed something that could walk upright, but could be expressed in simple shapes. Penguins worked out well. Here's what the first iteration of penguin looked like:

He was kind of ugly, but he was my first little penguin creation. Fortunately a good friend helped me redesign him and came up with the current design for the main penguin soldier.

The next 4 months were spent defining the game. How will units spawn? How many can you have on the field? How will they attack? What can the player directly control? What type of units will I have? Will there be attack bonuses? Unit weaknesses? ABILITIES!? The list goes on and on. I play tested at least 10 different iterations of the game. Ultimately I settled and drew inspiration from two popular games in the genre, Cartoon Wars and Battle Cats. I combined what I liked about those two games and that's how the design for Penguin Siege ended up being completed ( of course I am over simplifying the process).

Technical Issues and Learnings:

It is an understatement to say I learned a lot from this project. This project broke me down and reshaped me as a designer, coder, artist, animator, developer, and sound artist. There are aspects to game development that you will never learn if you only do small scale projects. It is often the case that my development decisions completely prevented ideas I wanted to implement. For example, unit targeting has been a challenge from the beginning. Currently there is an issue where units with very long attack animations will get interrupted often due to units dying. This however is a biproduct of the 3000 lines of code it took to develop a Unit AI. 

Before this becomes too long, I just want to document some of my learnings. In this project I learned:

• Enemy and Unit AI
• Skeleton Based Animation and Rigging
• Particle System Creation and Management
• Ability Systems
• UI Design (oh god that was brutal)
• 2D Lighting effects
• Camera Effects
• Abstract Classes and how to implement them in your games
• Unity Event Triggers (these are fantastic)
• Scriptable Objects
• Managing larger code
• 2D Art in photoshop
• Basic Sound Design using Audacity
• And many many many more important details

This is just a small list of things I learned along this journey. Perhaps this postmortem may have been longer and wordier than it needed to be. But I'd like for it to serve as a record for myself looking back years from now. Hopefully by then I would have made it into the industry and can make games 10xs better than what I can make today. One step at a time, one goal at a time, and perhaps one day I can make it. My goal is to continue game development and to one day become a professional indie dev that can create games people love.

Here are some photos of early development: