Just like to introduce my new game made with UE4 - Garden Wars. It’s on Steam Greenlight at the moment so feel free to give it a vote if you have a moment! (or use this link if you have steam installed).
It’s a very basic version of a RTS, can be thought of as a much simplified version of Populous, but with plants. It’s targeted toward the crowd that may not have played much real-time strategy before, but testing has proven it’s still fun for seasoned gamers as well.
This started as an interim project to help me transition from UE3 to UE4 (and still is), but expanded a bit more than I expected.
It’s (currently) Blueprint-only… may end up converting to a code project for some final shipping features. It’s taken about 6 months full-time to produce on my own, and I expect a couple more months work to finish it off (I do expect to ship on mobile but trying for PC/Mac/Linux first if it can get greenlit).
Anyway, here’s the game details! I’m going to be posting a bunch of stuff about the game (and some UE4 tutorials) in the next couple of weeks so I’ll update this thread as I go.
Garden Wars!
Send in the GOAT to eat your pesky neighbor’s plants, or maybe some Rabbits? It’s gardener vs gardener and you must do everything in your power to dominate the garden with your plants!
But watch out because your rival has the same idea… Perhaps it is best to concentrate on clearing the ground for your own plants to spread? Or try boosting your bee population to make your fruit grow faster? The more plants you have, the more juice you have to spend on TOTAL GARDEN DOMINATION!
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Garden Wars* puts you in the shoes of the gardening god. Easy to learn, but the more you play, the more you realize you will need a good strategy to completely rid the garden of your formidable foe’s foliage.
Features:
Play multi-player or single-player vs A.I.
Several difficulty levels for all types of players
Hundreds of levels
Fun, clean graphics
See how you rank in the world and among your friends
This game has been well outside my comfort zone as far as art style goes. It’s been really interesting balancing the light RTS gameplay (and making the AI play well). Assuming it gets Greenlit then it’ll be interesting to see how the final push on multiplayer goes (it works at the moment but I have added a few features since I last checked, and I haven’t tested it over a proper, laggy network connection).
I made a new video where I describe the basics of the game (only briefly):
I wrote a new article on the method I used to render a screen mask, for the purposes of highlighting objects on screen (to help the player differentiate the clickable objects in certain situations): thread link
Thank you for sharing your development process, it’s been great to read how you are tackling different areas. Also, good luck with you Greenlight campaign, fingers crossed for you!
Wrote a new dev blog article describing how I used vertex shaders in this game to a) animate the plants and b) reduce draw calls from a potential ~2500 down to ~500 (for mobile reasons) - thread link