The Grass is Sweeter

Description

The Grass is Sweeter is a game where you must control swarms of righteous blue ants to overcome the evil red ants, ending their tyrannical rule over the plains of sweeter grass once and for all!
This is a simple RTS game inspired by mobile games like Battle Cats and Bloons TD.

Background

This was the second game I helped create as part of the "Game Studio" class in RRC's Game Development program. For this assignment, we were assigned into groups with our desk neighbours and told to make a simple 2D Unity game, but this time we were allowed to write code. I was put in a group of 3, which was the smallest group size in the class, only having one artist where every other group had two.
This pretty substantially limited what kind of game we'd be able to make in terms of visuals, so we opted to keep our game as simple as we could manage. Our instructor had us do an exercise where we'd brainstorm ideas based on randomized prompts. After 3 rounds of this, our group was pretty dead-set on a game about ant imperialism. We knew one of our classmates had created a boids swarming system for a previous programming assignment, so we figured we'd give that a spin! And with that, "The Grass is Sweeter" was born.

Goals

We wanted to make a prototype for an ant-themed RTS/Tower Defense game with swarming mechanics. The intent was to go for a mobile game style, as that would allow us to keep the scope relatively constrained.

Reflections

What went right:

We pretty successfully nailed down the core appeal of our game pretty much from the get go. We knew immediately that it came down to three simple points:
- Simplicity.
- Sense of Humour.
- Seeing a buttload of ants on the screen.
I think we did a pretty good job of delivering on that.

What went wrong:

This was the first time I've ever had to work with another programmer who was roughly at my skill level for an extended period, while using Github collaboratively. Balancing the creation of the core game systems without accidentally suffering some merge conflicts was quite stressful at times. Sadie and I did our best to communicate what we were working on to avoid this, but especially as we relaxed a bit later in the project, we wound up running into issues. The value of branches is clearer to me now more than ever.
I also think we should have focused on getting the core functionality in play sooner, because we weren't able to do much meaningful playtesting until much later than we should have been able to. As a result, the balancing is pretty wonky and it wasn't clear how everything worked for many players.

Overall Thoughts:

I'm the type of person that thrives in a team environment, but I'd be lying if I said that there weren't some hiccups along the way here. This project made me put my skills as a hype man to the test. I made it my personal mission to make sure that my classmates and I maintained high morale while working on it and I'd say that I was pretty successful in doing that for my classmates. Though I fully admit that I was really starting to feel my interest wane after week 3 of ant game. That said, at the end of the day, I'm quite proud of what we were able to make.

A Fun Fact About This Project

Midterm burnout was really getting to us at various parts of the project, so often our group would devolve into chanting "ants, ants, ants." Even our other classmates started to do the same after a while. It was infectious...