Brooklyn 1776
Explore the First battle of the American army
Mobile game released October 2015.
Role:
Lead Programmer
Project Status:
Released
Brooklyn 1776 is a light, tactical strategy game for mobile devices. Players take control the American Continental Army and face off against the British and their Hessian allies during the Battle of Brooklyn in the Revolutionary War. There were two main goals for project. The first was to develop and release a mobile game in three months. The second was to design a game that was not only fun but would also expose players to what happened during one of the most important battles in American history.
To tackle these admittedly ambitious goals there were a few major technical challenges to overcome namely: Unit pathfinding, Enemy AI, and range finding. Each one of these problems required me to do research into common gameplay programming techniques. To implement pathfinding I leveraged the A* algorithm. The next problem was range finding, utilizing a modified breadth-first search algorithm I was able to calculate what units were in range of any given unit. The last major technical challenge was implementing an AI that would be not only challenging to the player but also act similarly to how the British did during the battle. The heavy lifting (pathfinding and range finding) for the AI was already taken care of. All I had to do now was build an algorithm that would properly leverage these functions. The solution I came up with had two major parts. First the AI would find the closest American unit. Then it would calculate if it could fire upon that unit. If it was in range it would simply fire, otherwise it would move closer and end it's turn. Last by carefully selecting where the enemies would spawn I could make them react much like the British did during the battle.
When I look back at Brooklyn 1776 there are a few things that I came to mind. While we were essentially feature complete in three months the game was not very polished, so we spent another month polishing the game up before launch. I believe we could have hit our three month milestone if we had scoped more appropriately during our first month. Although as I understand it learning to properly scope projects is something designers are learning to do their whole lives. At the end of the project I had to return to my masters program which necessitated handing the game off to another programmer to finish polishing the game. The experience of building a game and then handing over the codebase to someone else to polish was very illuminating and drove home the importance of well documented and commented code. The last thing that comes to mind is a design decision we made. We decided not to explicitly tell the players what the goal of the game was. The idea behind the decision was we wanted players to learn through action and we did not want to give away too much. This in the end felt more like an amateur design mistake and lead to many players getting very lost. We have since tried a bit better to communicate the goal of the game.
Overall I am proud of the project and what we were able to accomplish in a short time.
Developed with C# and Unity