A Turret's Life is a first person arcade shooter/tower defence game for PC and VR where you are the tower defending an area against the endless onslaught of attacking robots and crafting overpowered dream guns that can be traded as crypto-backed items.

Updates

This last week I worked on several different unrelated aspects.

Crafting Mechanics: I finished the fabricator system, which is the interface between taking the player's blueprints for an item and then creating a new instance of the item. I also finished adding functional UI displaying the stats of the modules and other information to the player. Best of all, I am now ready to start work on the actual placement of the crafted items!

Localization: During all this work with the UI I decided I should worry about the future now and prepare for the text localization. I have found a solution so when the time comes I can almost automatically convert the game into whatever language you guys want (instead of having to go through the entire source code and change the text by hand)!

Art: I have been researching some different art styles and contacting some freelance artists. I can't wait to get the actual game models in to world. I am still trying to nail down the exact style in regards to color and how stylized/cartoony it should be.

Progress

Art

The general art style of A Turret's Life has a few different names, but can be called stylized, hand-painted, or even cartoony.

There are two reasons for choosing this style:

First, it can be more unique. AAA game studios are masters of realism so it is impossible for indie games to compete, plus realistic games often can only look a certain way. A stylized game allows for more personality by under or over exaggerating certain elements like shape or color.

Second, they are more performant. In games, models are made up of hundreds of triangles. Each triangle takes its toll on the computer resources. Stylized games have fewer details, thus simpler textures and simpler models. A single, typical AAA realistic character can be made up of 100k polygons! The mobile devices like the Oculus Go can only handle about 50-100k polys for the entire loaded scene.... As you can see, there is a huge discrepancy between these two numbers. This essentially forces the game's art style down the stylized route. Even though A Turret's Life is also for the desktop PC, the Oculus Go acts as the lowest denominator in regards to performance.

Stylized opens many different possibilities, which is a very overwhelming decision to make. Should the game be cute or scary? Should the colors be bright or dark? How cartoony should it look? How arcady should the game feel? Ideally the art direction should make the game recognizable and pop out amidst a sea of social media images.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on this :)

This example picture of the same model, shows the difference between the realistic (left) and stylized (right) texturing types. Picture courtesy of https://80.lv/articles/realistic-vs-stylized-technique-overview/

Crafting Mechanic

The actual placement of the modules is, in my opinion, one of the most exciting and core features of the game. The placement allows the player their own freedom of expression to find a play style that is suitable to them, while at the same time it constitutes a separate puzzle since the players have to maximize their resources as well as space and weight on the turret to the maximum potential. Crafting becomes a meta-game in and of itself!

The placement system will use a node based system like in the series Galactic Civilizations, where a starting base piece contains some initial possible connections. The player then attaches structural parts to shape the general form of the turret as they'd like. Lastly, they connect functional modules to the structures, such as guns, armor, different sights etc.

However, I am toying with the idea of making a crafting system inspired from the game of Tetris, where the possible building space is represented as a 3d grid, and you have to place the different shaped modules in such a way that they will all fit together. I'm not sure if the turret modules are suitable for this, but I will experiment with it in the coming weeks.

There are four different types of turret sections that can be built namely the base turret, the guns, the ammo, and the HUD for in game. I will discuss each of these in more detail as I work on each section.

Join the Community!

Website: https://www.aturretslife.com/

Telegram: https://t.me/aturretslife

Until next time!