Fiducial Defence
Experimental games
Experimental games
Fiducial defence is an experimental Tower defence game. The gameplay and control systems are both rather niche, creating a novel experience for the player. The aim is to prevent the enemies reaching the end of the path. Instead of Building turrets on a grid, players move the available turrets around to deal with different threats. Currently there are 10 enemy waves built in each once getting progressively more difficult
Me Playing our finished game
Design and art: me
Tech: Finley Kelly
The Idea was to make a game controlled by the placement of objects in the real world. The idea was to make a tower defence game that could effectively use this concept. A lot of our design choices were built with the aim of getting a player to engage with the main mechanic of moving the pieces around
I designed how the turrets would look and how each one would work.
Each one follows the position of one of the Fiducial markers being tracked by the camera.
Each turret can be 1 of 3 colours, Red, Green, and Blue. This colour affects which enemies they will target. The colour of a turret is controlled by the rotation of its Fiducial Marker
Fires Bullets rapidly at the enemy
Fires explosive projectiles in an slow arc
Slow firing but does lots of single target damage
Each enemy was designed with a weakness to one turret and a resistance to another.
Enemies spawn as one of 3 colours and only take damage from attacks of that colour.
Shows up in large Hordes so the Mortar can deal with lots of them at once but because they are so many, the laser is wasted on only a single one of them
a fast enemy that can be caught by the gatling turret, Its speed allows it to dodge the mortar
Lots of health so it takes a while for the other turrets to whittle down but the laser destroys it in 3 hits
When designing the map, I aimed to create a large area for testing. The map was made to be modular to make adding levels to the game easier if we had time to add more. The one map featured in uses a serpentine layout which had a good balance of path and placement area. The size requirement was that it would have scalable dimensions to A3 paper and would feature
There were multiple changes until I landed on the final design. from 1 cm x 1cm squares to 2 x 2 squares to shifting the path around to make the map more symmetrical
Version 1 with 1cm squares and 2cm wide path
version 2 with layout adjustment
Final version with 2cm squares