Concept art of the game's characters
The goal of the game is to kill the spiders by burning them, while trying not to get eaten by them and without burning yourself up in the process.
My original idea was that the fire would spread and eventually burn to ash, creating ash tiles that can no longer be ignited. The fires limit the areas you can move to and the ashes limit the areas you can attack, thus gradually increasing the difficulty of the game.
That turned out to be less than ideal, so instead the fire simply spreads and dies out, according to the rules of conway's game of life.
Controlled entirely with a mouse. The UI is designed to work with minimal mouse movements.
Players can move their units, burn adjacent tiles or push adjacent creatures onto the next tile.
Clicking on the player units presents you with your options and the movement range of that unit.
Clicking an empty tile gives you the option to end your turn.
I added the ability to push creatures, as I wanted player units to be able to "save" each other from being eaten.
Adding the ability to "push" creatures raised some design questions:
If the player can push spiders into the fire, then they don't have to ignite as many tiles to kill all the spiders. Does this make the game too easy?
If the player can push spiders into the fire, then they don't have to ignite as many tiles to kill all the spiders. Does this make the game too easy?
There were many things to consider when balancing the game...
I wanted to challenge myself with this project, which is why I made it a grid based game, instead of the 2D platforming that I was used to working with.
The key factor to programming this game was the pathfinding.
Pathfinding is necessary for all the enemies and players as well as the highlighted path drawn by the cursor.
First of all, the pathfinding algorithm has to be given a grid (or a partial grid) to search on.
So for that I used a modified flood fill algorithm.
It finds all the cells that a unit could move to inside a certain movement range.
This list of cells returns a partial grid on which I can run an A* algorithm, which returns the final path.
Needless to say, but this caused me many headaches to get right.