Graffiti Tower Defense

About:

Graffiti Tower Defense is a 3D tower defense game built with a custom C++ engine. Waves of enemy paint drops walk down a path towards your wall of art that you must defend! This game features over 10 different towers, 3 enemy types, and 5 levels. This game was made as a final project for Full Sail University.

Gameplay:

Personal Contributions:

Text implementation with DirectWrite

For rendering text on the screen, I decided to utilize DirectWrite, a text layout rendering API by Microsoft. To draw the text onto the raster target, I used Direct2D and drew on the same backbuffer as the 3D rendered objects. I created a Text class that allows the changing of the font, font size, text color, and text style at runtime. The picture to the right showcases the HUD, which is something I created with use of my text class and it showcases text being rendering which updates during the game. One of the most important features of this text API is that the font size can be changed to any size at compile/runtime.

Highlights:

• Customizable font, color, and text style
• Renders text onto same backbuffer as 3D rendered objects
• Vector graphics API allows any font size at compile/runtime

GameObject system

Each object in the game is a "GameObject" with multiple components. I built this system, which follows Unity's GameObject system closely, to control how objects are rendered and how the general game loop is ran. Each object can have multiple components such as Animator, MeshRenderer, Collider, Material, and Lights. When GameObjects get deleted, they delete all dynamic memory they have and get removed from a GameObject hierarchy. I personally created many of the components like the Animator, MeshRenderer, PointLight, DirectionalLight, and Material.

3D meshes, textures, animations, and sprites

I created nearly all the 3D meshes, textures, animations, and sprites for the game using Blender and Photoshop. As well as creating the animations, I also skinned the 3D models in a pixel shader. Although the project was made to learn game development, assets were needed to make the game visually complete. Therefore, along with programming the C++ engine and designing the game, I also modeled and drew assets for the game. I have a history of making art, so creating the assets was something I happily accepted as a job.

Lighting

Graffiti Tower Defense utilizes two different lights: Point and Directional. I created both of these lights as components to our GameObjects. If a developer wanted to add a point or directional light, they would simply have to add it as a component to a GameObject. Afterwards, they could adjust the color, intensity, and radius of the light. In the Render loop of our game, I check each existing GameObject for lights and add their data to a lighting constant buffer. In the standard pixel shader, lighting gets rendered using the constant buffer.

Shop System

One of the biggest components of Graffiti Tower Defense is the shop system. Killing enemies will give the player money, and the only place to spend that money is the shop. This makes the focus and progression of the game be unlocking new towers and upgrading current towers. I created the buying/selling features of the shop, as well as showing the tower radius.