Fiducial Defence

Experimental games

Gameplay Video

Me Playing our finished game

Team

Design: me
Tech: Finley Kelly

4 weeks of Ideas
8 weeks of development time

Premise

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

Idea Inception

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

Turret design

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

Gatling Turret

Fires Bullets rapidly at the enemy

Mortar Turret

Fires explosive projectiles in an slow arc

Laser Turret

Slow firing but does lots of single target damage

Enemy Design

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.

Segway

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

Car

a fast enemy that can be caught by the gatling turret, Its speed allows it to dodge the mortar

Tank

Lots of health so it takes a while for the other turrets to whittle down but the laser destroys it in 3 hits

Physical pieces

Thanks to Finley's understanding of computer vision we were able to track the location and rotation of these fiducial markers using a board that had its own markers to place the turrets in game.

I ended up making 6 turret markers in case we wanted to add more turrets

The Playmat

This design is the final version and the reason behind the larger corner squares is so that the camera can see them much easier.

Otherwise it shares the dimensions of the map currently built, and any other maps that may be added in the future

Map

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 enough turns that the player would have ample opportunity to attack the enemies

There were multiple changes until I landed on this final design. from 1 cm x 1cm squares, that would have been barely visible on the A4 scale map we ended up with, to 2 x 2 squares and shifting the path around to make the map more symmetrical.

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