Hello and thank you for taking a peek at my game! Planetary Defense was created as my capstone project for my Bachelor's Degree in Game Design and Development. College has been a wild ride and oftentimes, it felt like the more I learned, the less I knew. Looking back on it all now, I've come a long from that first GameMaker Studio 2 assignment I turned in all those years ago... I hope that whoever you are, this game manages to be a nice little distraction! Anyway, I'm not sure I have the time or energy left to really give this entire project its due sendoff at this point, but I'll do my best and hopefully someone can take something away from all this.

One of the toughest parts of game development for me will probably always be that no matter how smoothly development goes, you will NEVER have enough time to implement everything you want. Even this game, which I specifically conceptualized as something simplistic that I could feasibly develop solo experienced significant content cuts. Originally, I saw this game as something of a hybrid of tower defense and real time strategy by allowing the player to command simple unity around the map to supplement expensive, immobile towers. Though I loved this idea, the fighters were one of the first things to go. Many tower and enemy ideas soon followed...

Funny enough, this project contains the first instance of un-cutting content I've ever experienced. Midway through the semester, I was very seriously considering cutting the random event system. I just wasn't feeling very excited to work on it and kept putting it off in favor of other features until I eventually decided the time it would take to add it might be better spent on new enemies. However, the prototype version of it that I had already put together was well received by classmates and one even went so far as to call it their favorite thing in the game. Thus, a fully functional event system was back on the to-do list.

I think the thing I'm most proud of in this project is just the overall presentation. It most certainly has some rough edges, but I think I managed to pull together a bunch of free assets well enough, and I'm actually really happy with the UI and Particle Effects I created. I like to think I managed to create a nice, juicy game feel with what I had to work with, and I think it's just plain interesting to watch for the few minutes or so it takes. I think I'm also fairly proud of a lot of the backend systems I put together, though I won't bore you with descriptions. Just because I'm happy with them doesn't actually make them exciting.

Anyway, I'm never good at thinking up things to say when the time comes, so I think I'll go ahead and wrap it up here. Once again, thank you so much for looking at my work and reading all this. I really appreciate it!