Techno Towers Postmortem

We had planned to have Techno Towers finished by the end of the school year. Plans change. Towards the end of the semester, communications started to fall apart. The seniors' last day was a few weeks before ours, and people got busy, went on vacation, etc. Goals weren't too clear, and we had just swapped team management sites. We nearly had level 1 playable, but there were many assorted small bits left to do. There were icons and models and program-y things everywhere. Early in the summer, we had acknowledged that we wanted the game finished before we moved on in the new school year. We mostly remained idle until about July, when the deadline was more looming. Most of the work, including some art, was done by programmers Liam and Mabel. The majority of the team couldn't help at all in the summer.

I was the only 3D artist left. Luckily, there wasn't much modeling left to do. One or two turrets here, a projectile there. The bulk of the work was done in decorating the levels. A dozen or so small props in a given theme per level. Then I did a whole bunch of transforming, scaling, rotating, and duplicating them around until the level was visually pleasing. As each level progresses, your view zooms out, so the prop arrangement had to work at several scales. The post process outlines gave an extra challenge in scaling. The workflow was otherwise quick and unremarkable.

We got it all put together in the end. It's pretty difficult; I'd be impressed if anyone is able to beat it. The damage system is pretty convoluted and I doubt I'd be able to figure it out without help from the programmers. It's not as visually striking as i'd hoped, but hey, it's a published game.

Play it here:

https://studio-gomp.itch.io/techno-towers