EndSoldier

What’s the game?

EndSoldier is an isometric tactical shooter survival game. The player controls a single operative who fights continuous waves of enemies, which are increasingly difficult and varied. As they fight, they rack up cash which can be used to purchase weapons and medpacks.

What did I do, and why?

Why? Well, I wanted to make a game and release it somewhere. Simple as that. So, I intially planned on doing some kind of tactical, room clearning game. But as I continued to work, eventually I realized it just felt better having the play area be a less constrained environment. So, I decided to expand it to sort of a little village.

The wave-survival format was just a nice, simple, natural choice. I didn’t think about it too much. Looking back, this has got to be one of the easiest types of games to make fun. The pressure to survive and chase upgrades comes naturally - all you have to do is provide interesting or at least satisfyingly fun content.

What kind of things did I learn?

I used assets I had purchased on the Unity store which were extremely helpful and looked great! While I didn’t make the animations myself, I did get to learn about blend trees for example - smoothly blending between different animation states like reloading and walking at the same time. I also implemented particle effects like little blood puffs and muzzle flashes. The game has controller support, which proved to be much more challenging than I initially thought, because it involved getting some trigonometry right.

I needed to implement some outlines to allow the user to still see themselves and enemies from behind buildings, so that was an interesting challenge, and I think the result worked well enough.

This was also my first time interacting with social media to get testers and feedback. Mostly posting on Reddit. But that was very helpful for me.

All in all, it was very fun to make this project and really made me feel more confident as a Unity engineer and as a game developer.

You can play it too!

The game is hosted on itch.io and is available to play in-browser . Enjoy!