Edward Tan's Portfolio
Minor Scale is a rhythm-based tower defense game built in Unreal Engine 5 where you activate towers to the beat of the music. I worked on it with 21 other university students. I helped design the maps, enemies, and towers, and I created and balanced the enemy waves and difficult settings.
Designing the mechanics
Early on in development, most of the design work was collaborative, planning out the overall vision and scope in meetings with the entire team. We discussed and came to agreements on how the rhythm would interact with the tower defense, what kinds of towers would be in the game and how many, and what kinds of enemies there would be. We also each submitted our designs for the different maps and decided which ones were best. My design for level 2 was selected.
Programming projectiles
My individual contributions during this period mostly consisted of adding various functions to the projectiles, such as parent classes for projectiles, as well as on-hit effects and UI features.
Creating the Enemy Waves
Once we got to the later stages of development, a lot of my work was in creating the waves for each level. I designed the waves, added them to the game, and tested and balanced the difficulties. The hardest part was adding the waves into each level. The way we had it set up was that you would add rows to a data table, with each row containing the type of enemy, the amount of enemies, and time in between each enemy. The problem was that each row had to finish before moving onto the next row, so I could only send one type of enemy at a time. To get around this, I had to to send many very small waves that alternated at specific intervals to give the impression that they were occurring simultaneously.
Biggest Sucess: Tower Defense
The tower defense aspect ended up being the most engaging for players. We had a solid balance of towers and enemies that players really enjoyed. In particular, having a tower that gives special bonuses to all towers in its range gave players an extra layer of depth to consider when thinking about where to place their towers.
Biggest Failure: Rhythm
Throughout the entire development process, we struggled to really merge the two genres. The problem was that players like to look at the enemy waves in order to see where their defense has holes and possibly add towers during the middle of the wave. They can't do that while trying to perform a rhythm game. Our solution ended up being to make the rhythm game really easy, so that players could complete it without even having to look at it, which turns it into more of a nuisance than a challenge.
Biggest Lesson Learned: When to Streamline and When to Use Brute Force
One of the reasons we couldn't develop the rhythm game further was because we took too long to develop the rhythm system. We actually were brainstorming more creative ways to allow players to play the rhythm game while still being able to look at the tower defense. But we didn't have time to implement them, so we had to settle for neutering the rhythm game. The reason it took so long was because we focused too much on creating a streamlined way to add the notes. In hindsight, we only had 3 tracks with 3 difficulties each. It would've taken way less time to just brute force it and add all the notes manually. The value of streamlining is directly correlated with the scope of the game and our scope wasn't that big.