Overview / Usage

Castle Fight is a student game from Games & Playable Media program in University of California Santa Cruz.

• Project description:

Core gameplay:

Castle Fight is a strategic building game. In this game player will first use different blocks: weapons, shields and buff, to build a castle, then the player will observe how his castle destroys the enemy, or gets destroyed.

Before the game

Players can choose their commander, each commander has a unique skill.

Players can also customize the block set as they like, such as changing the block's function and its ratio in the block set.

During the game

The game has two phases: Building Phase and Battle Phase

Building Phase

In the building phase, players need to build a castle with tetrominoes. These blocks have different uses later in the Battle Phase.

Battle Phase

In Battle Phases, the fight will automatically happen after the building time is up or both players’ castles are reaching the limited height. Based on the strategy that players built in the building phase, each block will apply its utility. In this phase players can use the commander's skill.

• Team members:

Kunyu Wang: Creative Director, Level Designer

Jax Wu: Producer, UX & Audio Designer

Christopher Huynh: Techincal Director, Game Engineer

Yu Qiao: Development Director, Artist & Animator

Joe Huang: Game Developer, Level Designer

Special thanks for audio design:
Matteo Fasano
Poon Chun Yeung
Simon Lace
Zion Thomson

Methodology / Approach

Castle Fight is developed by a diverse student team of engineers and designers.

Our initial prototype of the game was developed in Unity as a pure 2D game. Once we were able to complete our core game loop, we moved the game over into Unreal Engine.

Considering that we were short of hands, we needed a clear pipeline to make our design and production process as efficient as possible. Unreal Engine was perfect for this as its blueprint system was friendly and easy to understand for our artists and designers to quickly design and implement features. We also used Perforce for version control to avoid any unnecessary conflicts when working on several shared objects and components throughout the project.

We wanted to make that players were able to understand our gameplay as well as be able to develop a sense of mastery of its concepts. In order to achieve this we did plenty of user experience research and testing. Using this data, we developed and fine tuned a single player mode to act as a tutorial, redesigned our UI system to better guide our players, and balanced the controls and gameplay.

Technologies Used

• Game engine: Unreal 4
• Coding: Visual Studio
• Design: Photoshop
• Animation: Spine
• Audio: Reaper, FMOD

Other links

• Download the playable demo

Collaborators