GUARDIANS OF THE FOREST

'Guardians of the Forest' is my biggest project to date, taking over 3 years (on and off) to complete. This project was created throughout my first 3 years at University in-between modules, and has captured my development in game creation and programming from those years spent in education. Constant re-visits to tweak and improve this game have occurred until I finally felt happy to finalize the project, bringing a close to its development cycle.

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The aim of this project was to take a well known, popular game and re-create it with my own twist. I wanted to showcase my skills in C# programming as well as my general game creation skills with good and concise code, interesting features, level building, UI design, and more. After much thought, 'Angry Birds' was the chosen game to base this project on due to the game's well known mechanics and appeal to the mass audience. I also liked the concepts within Angry Birds, such as the different bird characters with unique power-ups and attacks, plus the destructible level designs.
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Similar to Angry Birds, there are multiple levels in Guardians of the Forest full of enemies that need to be defeated in order to move on to the next level. The environment in each level is destructible to aid the player in their goal. There are three wizards who are each equipped with projectiles and power-ups unique to their personality, and the player must select one wizard and one projectile before starting the game. In total, there are 8 levels in the game which increase in difficulty through complex structure and level design, plus an increase in enemies. The game features a save/load system for the player to utilize and all assets used in the game - from pixel art to animations to sound effects - were either collected free of charge or bought from the Unity Asset Store - these will be credited below.

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With my time in College I learned a lot about Unreal Engine 4 and C++ Blueprint coding, and it wasn't until my first year at University (after my foundation year) when I began learning C# in education. This wasn't my first encounter with C#, however, as I took the time to learn the language, along with Unity game development, during my foundation year of University. I began work on Guardians of the Forest during my foundation year to put my learning into practice. Throughout this project, I have greatly developed my skills with Unity, game creation and programming with C#, and I feel very proud with how it turned out. I managed to achieve every goal I set at the start of development, and solved many challenging problems along the way which further enhanced my knowledge.

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If I were to spend another year on the project with more resources, I would look into adding more interesting, bigger, and diverse levels that would allow for multiple wizard characters to be used at once. I would also certainly add more wizard characters with projectiles and power-ups, as this was my favourite part about creating the game. Finally, some sort of co-op system would be a good challenge to tackle.

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Guardians of the Forest assets credits:
- Characters and Enemies: pancakegames (Unity Asset Store)

- Projectiles: bestgamekits (Unity Asset Store)

- Environment Assets: Cainos (Unity Asset Store)
- Backgrounds: CPasteGame (Unity Asset Store)
- Character, Enemy, and Projectile Sounds: Freesound.org

- Menu and Level Music: Intersonic Sound, Olivier Girardot, Alan Zaring, and University of Games (Unity Asset Store)

- All UI Elements: bonk! (Unity Asset Store)