Summary:

      "Trinity Tower Defense" is a cooperative tower defense game in which three players take the role of angels who must hold off the demon hordes. Each angel has an elemental power of either fire, ice, or lightning. The fire and ice angels can only kill demons of their opposite elemental type, while the lightning angel can only defeat flying monsters. Each power has its own attack style and cooldown which means that cooperation is paramount to survival.

 

Development Time:

     3 weeks - 1 week planning; 2 weeks development

 

Team:

     Etaba Assigana - Sound Designer

     Jimit Bhalani - Programmer

     Gabriel Burgess - Programmer

     Prajwal Manjunath - Programmer, Environment Artist

     Hannah Turner - Artist

 

Technology:

     CAVE (a multiprojector setup for immersion), Playstation Move, and a pneumatic floor for simulated ground motion.

 

Challenges:

     1) Encouraging Cooperation -

 

      In early playtests we found that players had little difficulty defeating the enemies without talking to each other very often. So instead of having all of the players shoot projectiles from themselves, we changed the firing mechanics so that they were more environmental. Each attack comes from a different location, has a different area of effect, a different speed, and different cooldown. We also had the various types of demons come from different sides of the map. This made cooperation a necessity if they wanted to ensure that they made it throughout the game without their shield being destroyed. The final boss also recquires that all three players combine their powers in order to defeat it. We were ultimately able to accomplish our goal and an earlier version of our game was recorded for a feature on the Discovery Channel.

 

   2) Input -

 

     The aiming data is derived from the orientation data from the gyroscopes of the PSMove controllers, but not taken directly from it. While the orientation was directly usable for my other project "What Killed The Buler?", in this case we needed a way to determine the on screen coordinates. So the orientation data had to be converted into a 2D coordinate (X and Y) which ranged from (X:0, Y:0) to (X:1, Y:1). (0,0) represents the bottom-left of the far left screen. (1,1) represents the top-right of the far right screen. It was done this way so that it could be determined whether the crosshairs ever overlapped which was necessary for the final boss battle. This was also done to avoid the problem of a crosshair going off the screen.