Prototype

The next step for our game is to make a playable prototype to showcase the main mechanics of our game and see if the game will be interesting and fun.

What we want in the prototype:

• The player
  The player will control a monster and be able to switch to others. Player has to be able to maneuver through the dungeon easily and kill the enemies.

• Switching mechanic
  The player has to be able to switch between the different monster types to be able to use all the abilities to defend his dungeon. Some monsters will be better versus specific enemies.

• Wave system
  We need enemy waves to attack the dungeon some will be manually setup others will be procedurally generated.

• Basic game loop
  The player has to be able to start the game and lose the game.

What we created:

The player
The player can move around through the level and attack and kill the enemies. This was going to be all the player could do but that doesn’t feel great.
The enemies get stronger and more numerous every wave and the player being stagnant doesn’t make to much sense. We decided to add an upgrade system so the player also becomes more powerful as the game goes on.

Switching mechanic

We started with a basic switching mechanic where when you press a button you switch to the next monster. We wanted to expand this so you could leave your different monsters in rooms to autonomously fight for you and defend rooms.
Since implementing the autonomous monsters took to long and seemed to not be as interesting as we expected it to be. 

We decided to switch to another system where there is only one character.
We attached all the abilities of the different characters to one monster this basically gave us the same result without the autonomous mechanic which we did not implement anyway.

Wave system

We wanted enemies with custom pathfinding to be able to move more freely through the rooms. We can still add this if there is time left but for now we will design the map to be easily accessible for the enemies. The enemies just move left and the map allows them to cascade through the level and reach their end goal.
Now the enemies are very static, but they are functional for this prototype. We have some simple adjustments in mind that won’t require a pathfinding system but can make them more interesting.

• Ladders
  Every time they pass a ladder they could have a random chance to use them making them split up from their groups and end up in different area that the player has to deal with.

• Control points
  If they reach all control points in a room they conquer the room moving their spawn points closer.
  The player could then kill the troops holding the points to unlock the room pushing the enemies back.
  These points would trigger when a specific unit type stumbles upon them.

Basic game loop

The game starts when the player presses a button.
Then the waves start spawning first some handmade waves for tutorial stages to learn the enemy types and to not overwhelm the player.
When these waves are finished. The game starts to procedurally generate waves till the player loses.

Every wave the player get’s an upgrade point that they can spend on their abilities to make them stronger. The current version just gives cooldown reduction but we want to change this,  so every part of the ability gets stronger: damage, cooldown and maybe some special upgrades at breakpoint levels for example the ranged attack pierces at level 5.

But while you get stronger the enemies become more numerous.
We also want the individual enemies to become stronger.

When the enemies overpower the player, they will reach the end gate and win.
We will change this so the enemies have to destroy the gate so it doesn't just end when you forget a single enemy.

Toon shading in hdrp

Getting a toon/cell shader to work in hdrp was more difficult than expected.

The main problem is that the hdrp is meant for high fidelity graphics, so it misses key features that facilitate the making of stylized shaders. I was definitely not the first person to want to combine the beauty of the hd render pipeline with the toon shaded aesthetic (see realToon and JasonMaToon), but their projects were of no help for various reasons;

I had given up on having dynamic toon shading that reacts to lights in the level and decided to fake the aesthetic in other ways

But then I came across, yet another tutorial meant for the urp, and this time I noticed they were using another method to achieve toon shading. So, I gave it a try and it worked in the hdrp as well!