Firearm Plant Simulator

You manage a garden that grows firearms and explosives which are used to defend the garden against enemies who are trying to destroy the garden. To help you defend yourself against the swarming enemies use collect the fertilizer they leave behind to get different types of weapons grown by your garden.

Controls

Movement: WASD
Jump: Space
Sprint: Hold Shift
Crouch:  Toggle with Ctrl
Look:  Mouse movement
Object Interaction: E
Main Fire: Left Mouse Button
Aim Down Sight: Right Mouse Button
Melee attack: Middle Mouse Button
Change Hotbar Selection: Scroll Wheel, or applicable number key
Switch Between Hotbars: Tab
Pause: Backspace

Credits

Steve Lloyd - Producer, Designer, Programmer
Tom Hansen - Designer, Programmer
Kendry Johnson - QA, Programmer
Jesus Franco Yescas - Programmer
Wynne Farley - Artist, Level Designer

Post Mortem

To learn how to work with professionally-written code, we based our project on Unity’s FPS Microgame Template (https://learn.unity.com/project/fps-template). This included systems controlling the player, the weapons, the enemies, an objectives system, etc. using advanced Unity features such as the UnityEvent. We thought this would save a lot of time on implementing features, but we likely ended up spending more time wrestling with FPS Microgame’s code, than we would have spent building it from scratch. FPS Microgame was not built for some of the features we wanted to create, so we had to hack a lot of the systems together, working around the limitations of the template. Our code is really a mess, and it would be very difficult to expand the game in the future. We would rather just start again from scratch, without using FPS Microgame.

We used Discord to communicate, and coordinate our work. We met up over voice chat as necessary, especially after class and on weekend evenings, where we discussed design, programming, tasks, and deadlines. This worked really well, considering we only duplicated efforts once, on the tutorial system, when we hadn’t met over Discord for several days. If we were to do this project all over again, we would still use Discord.

Perhaps the single greatest factor that affected development is quarantine. Many of us suffered from an occasionally changing situation, which could pause one’s efforts on the game for a few days to a week, and all of us suffered from low motivation and morale. Considering this and the scope of the project, development probably went as well as it could have been expected to. We implemented most of the features described by the design document, but we had to throw out a few of the more difficult systems, such as a system that allows you to modify the stats and effects of your weapons, using different combinations of fertilizers. However, the game is still playable and complete, and we find it fun.

We used Unity Collab to share our codebase. It was very buggy, and caused us to have to restart Unity often, but we are unsure of whether it would have been less of a hassle if we had used GitHub, or some other source control software.