Liam Turner

'Tower Tyrant' is a study into Artificial Intelligence and Management

​

I started work on Tower Tyrant as my major project for semester two. This game is mostly a passion project influenced by simulation games I played in my youth (SimTower, 1994) and games I play in the present(Cities: Skylines, 2015), however I intend to eventually release it as a completed product.

 

Tower Tyrant is a tower simulation game, the player is put in control of building and maintaining a skyrise, to complete goals and ultimately succeed in scenarios.  The game’s challenge comes from managing the day to day income and expenses, dealing with random events and creating an impressive tower.

 

The game’s aesthetic is designed to be simple and readily readable, using a low poly style with a colour palette that can be used to distinguish the functionalities of different rooms. This style also allows the game to maintain a relatively low hardware requirement and allows me to produce more content quickly, which is important as a solo developer.

 

The defining feature of the game, is how the player chooses to operate their tower. Based on how the player builds and reacts to in game events allows them to steer towards either a lawful, legal management path, filled with regulations and financial obstacles or an unlawful and legally questionable path which can provide large sums of money, with the risk of losing it all if the dodgy deals are discovered.

​

Features:

• Custom A* Pathfinding AI

• 'Scenarios' created using Unity's Scriptable Objects

• Dynamic wall generation

• Randomised AI characters with their own individual schedules

• Clean low poly art-style

• Ability to change the game speed

• Day/Night Cycle

• Saving and Loading using binary serialization

• Finite State Machine AI

​​

What I worked on:

• Code/Scripts written in C#

• 3D Modelling in Blender

• Rigging and Animation in Blender

• Textures/Sprites/Graphics in Photoshop

• Managing the project in Unity

• General design documentation and concepts