Update log
Full IRON GUARD update
The complete published notes, normalized for clean reading and source attribution.
Repeated intro
Hello! My name is Artem Netyagin and I'm author of IRON GUARD game. I wanted to share with all my passion project, which dragged on for almost seven years, underwent three complete alterations, change of team, several changes to the platform, and only now has it finally begun to move towards its logical conclusion.
Extracted changes
- Gameplay
- Performance
Lyrical digression
I have two bad traits.
First, I really don't like monotony. Even as a schoolboy, I hated going to school, only because the route was terribly boring. I got impatient as I felt I was wasting time on the road.
Later when I started my career in the gaming industry, I quickly got tired of working on long projects, so in my free time I worked on prototypes. Which are still lying around on old HDD and sometimes as in this instance, being completely naive started work on two projects in parallel.
Secondly, I am an "absolute perfectionist", as my colleagues refer to me.
I will torment, suffer and pull my hair out and of others also, if something does not work out the way I imagined it, or if I cannot execute everything as I had planned.
I hope you find this article interesting, and maybe it’s even useful to someone. Yeah, and sorry for bad english :)
Me, in 2013 as a young developer, who already knew his way around the engine (Unity), teamed up with a programmer, and together we began to work on a mobile Tower Defense game. Along with this, we started a social media group, where we would share screenshots and news of our work. This was a great decision, because thanks to this, many old screenshots have been preserved and the development history can be seen at a glance.
It’s difficult to remember all the details, but as I remember we started with Unity 3.5, it had no proper UI back then, so we made our own. We tried to keep performance less than 100 drawcalls by combining meshes together and optimized it to the maximum. I created 3D models of the level and turrets, and bought the enemies characters from the Asset Store.
As for the idea and gameplay, there isn't much to write home about. At the time, I really liked the game Tower Defense - Lost Earth and wanted to do something similar. The thought process was quite straightforward: there was a road, enemies walking along it, players building and upgrading turrets to keep enemies out of the base. We came up with the plot, cutscenes, and dialogues much later but that's a completely different story.
Tower Defense - Lost Earth is still available on Google Play as Tower Defense: Infinite War.
We had hoped that we would make a small mobile game and it would be an easy project and wouldn’t take much time. Oh Boy! was I wrong...
Of course, everything was done with sheer enthusiasm. It was later that I derived the following axiom for myself “ Enthusiasm lasts a month.”
Without financial support, the only incentive for an indie, is the desire to create the game itself, but after a few weeks, when you are faced with personal and work regimen with lack of free time, the passion begins to slowly fade away and there is a risk of not finishing the project, which is what I faced.
Therefore, you need to either have a very strong commitment and support or not get involved in large projects and restrain your urges and start with something simpler. But
Source