Stephen Kolodychuk
Game Design Portfolio
The Full Story
A Lifetime of Creativity
Throughout my career, I’ve had the great fortune to work on some truly inspiring projects, while meeting many influential and creative individuals along the way. I believe in working together to create a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. For more information about my experience, portfolio or how we can collaborate on an upcoming project, get in touch today.
What is Tower Defense?
Tower Defense is a rogue-like tower defense game where the player is forced to adapt their strategies as new towers become available. This solo project was made to give me experience in designing procedural systems, balancing game economies, and working with third-party tools.
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Tower Defense was developed in Unity 2019.3 over the course of one semester using the Tower Defense Toolkit 4 (TDTK4) Unity asset as my base.
What Did I Work On?
For this project, I was the solo developer, although by using TDTK4, I did not need to spend much time on art, sounds, or the basic functionality of tower defense games. Instead I focused on:
- Procedural system design and implementation
- Design and develop additional mechanics
- Balance game with help of custom telemetry system
- Find and fix critical bugs in existing toolkit
What Did I Learn?
1) Comment your code
2) Test things in piecemeal to find problems
3) Player's perception of power levels is just as important as actual power levels
4) Managing randomness and variance