Project: Enigma is a hybrid 3D shooter/tower defense game, where the player must shoot at oncoming waves of enemies, all while constructing walls to influence their movement path. Set at the gates of hell, the protagonist’s role is to prevent various monsters from slipping through the portal to the surface world.

Controls:

  • Movement: WASD
  • Shooting / Building: Left Click
  • Reload: R
  • Mini-map toggle: Tab
  • Gun shop / upgrade tree: N
  • Cycle Guns: 1-4
  • Cycle Buildings: 1-9, Mouse wheel
  • Skip planning phase: Enter
  • Pause: ESC

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More information

Download

Download
Project-Enigma.zip 109 MB

Install instructions

Download the zip file, unzip and launch "Project-Enigma.exe"

Development log

Comments

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baconation2 years ago(+1)

This is unironically pretty good! I don't think it's necessarily a new idea and the implementation isn't perfect but I enjoyed this. The music and sound effects are a good fit but it seems like some of them are ripped from other games. Especially what I think is the wave complete sound from CoD: Zombies.

Some feedback:

  • The planning phase seems too quick. It may be better to lengthen the time and offer the player money for ending the phase early.
  • Constructed walls seem very thin. It might look better if constructed objects were thicker.
  • Do walls shoot primitive cubes? It would look better with custom sprites.
  • It can be hard to build from an FPS view. Planning would be easier from a top-down perspective.
  • The weapons list on the right of the screen makes it seem like you already have all weapons unlocked. Hiding or dimming weapons you do not have ammo for would make it more obvious.
  • Some UI elements take up more screen space than they need to. Scaling some elements down may make the interface easier to look at.
Reply
LarryV2 years ago (1 edit) (+1)

Thanks for the input baconation,

As background information, this is a game for a school project, so ripping off assets is "fine" since our intent is not to distribute a paid product. If ever we do continue iterating on this concept, we will for sure include original content and assets.

As for your feedback:

  • The planning phase will increase in length as the game extends (1 additional second per completed round). We are aware though that the duration might seem a little short for new players, but this is part of our design philosophy, moment to moment action-packed gameplay.  We will keep this in mind though and try out different values.
  •  The planning phase is skippable (Enter key), and awards the player a maximum of $20 (depending on how early it was skipped). However there is no visual indication anywhere so we will definitely add one in the future to avoid confusion.
  • For the FPS building point, I think I see where you are coming from. In a normal tower defense game, the speed at which you can build is limited by the movement of your mouse, which is pretty fast. While in Project Enigma, your building speed is limited by the character speed, adding on top of that a time constraint increases the difficulty of building. While it is indeed far more easy to build in a top down perspective, we want to stay consistent to the FPS genre and keep everything uniform. 
  • However we can see some foreseeable issues with this, notably if we were to added more turret types / upgrade trees, then tower menu would get way to big and clumsy to use.  So perhaps in a future iteration we would consider a camera transition between fps and top-down for the planning phase
  • In addition to this, in the next update the mini-map will contain turret information (color coded towers with upgrade icons) so it will be easier to find where you built turrets and plan your next move.
  • As for the UI and visuals feedback we think that all your points are valid and we will most likely incorporate them.

Regards, 

- LarryV

Reply
baconation1 year ago(+1)

Thanks for such a detailed response. Glad to see plans for future updates! If you ever want any play testing feel free to DM me.

Reply