Defend the WRLD!

Tower defense just got real.

Comment

Monsters have appeared off the coast of San Francisco and are attacking the city! As the city's friendly turret-building, monster-slaying, tax-paying giant, it's your duty to protect the streets of SF by bombarding said streets with ridiculous amounts of firepower. Do you have what it takes?

Inspiration

This game was born after we tried to come up with a winning hackathon idea for a while, utterly failed, went "screw it" and decided to make something completely ridiculous.

What it does

Defend the WRLD! is a fast-paced tower defense VR game that takes place in a shrunken version of San Francisco. Monsters wade out of the water and seek to destroy a target building as you frantically run through the city, placing turrets and moving existing ones in order to counter the enemy invasion.

How we built it

For map generation, we used WRLD's Unity SDK and repurposed it. We shrunk it down to toy scale, generated a navigation mesh that ran through the city, and used that to give monsters the intelligence they needed.

For turret interaction, we used the VRTK framework to prototype a UX/UI that allowed you to spawn, place, and move turrets around the city. The rest of the project was then straight-forward gameplay logic and asset manipulation.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into a lot of stability issues with both our hardware and software frameworks - I've lost count of how many times Unity crashed while running a test. A lot of technical challenges arose in how we made enemies move around the city properly.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

This was definitely our most complete hackathon project yet. We were able to create something with both a good deal of replayability and polish. What's really cool is that with the WRLD api, you can play a different map, a different experience, in any part of the mapped world. Manhattan in particular is quite fun.

What we learned

A lot about using VRTK "properly" (as opposed to hacking through the codebase and reimplementing things they already did). A lot about Unity's navigation system and AI. A lot about the potential of the WRLD api.

What's next for Defend the WRLD

More monsters! Upgradable and sellable turrets. An automatic system for deciding on home base for different experiences even within the same area.

Built With

Share this project:

Updates