The Keep

Develop your city’s resources in a constant race against vicious attacks in your Warzone.  Manage resources, defend your walls with unique towers, and hold the Keep through the night at any cost! 

The Keep is a bird’s-eye-view defense game centered around the premade main city.  Notably, this city has the same namesake as the game itself, it is dubbed “the Keep.” At the start of each day, known as a turn, resources (including wood, stone, gold, and manpower) are gained to upgrade different key locations within the Keep’s walls.  This gives the player more resources for each turn.

Why collect resources?  Well, the Keep is under attack!  Every night enemies come from the north to attack the Keep’s walls.  With the resources gained from production hotspots in the city, defensive items called towers are built to keep the citizen’s safe.  If they make it through the night, they must defend again the next.

The towers are built outside of the Keep’s walls in a player-buildable area called the Warzone.  Towers begin from a basic level 1 type but can be upgraded to be stronger and have specializations, including high-visibility and magic resistance.  This is to better defend against the different enemy types that attack the city.  This includes normal, rogue, and magic.

If the enemies make it to the wall, they will attack!  The walls of the Keep have durability.  if the player fails to keep a keen eye and let the wall health drop to zero, their city will be destroyed and they will experience a GAME OVER!!!

Controls:

Use the Up and Down arrows to control the camera or use your scroll wheel to move the camera up and down.

Click on the shop button to purchase towers using your stone, wood, and gold.

Click your city’s resource production to upgrade them in order to produce more of each resource.

During the night, click on enemies to assist your towers in defeating enemies.

Each night will get progressively harder, so make sure to upgrade your towers to stay ahead of the enemies.

Postmortem:

Our process of brainstorming and ideation was very successful. Despite a new group working on the game, we found each other's company to be an excellent environment to build a cool idea that we all wanted to work on. 

 It was important for us to agree on a project that was both feasible and something we all would enjoy.  Since we were all in that mindset, critiques never felt targeted.

Our group meetings felt less like work and more like fun, and we often would get lunch or Jamba juice separate from the work. It is way easier to work on a project like this when it feels like your groupmates are your friends.

However, what goes up must come down.  Friendship can sometimes turn into goofing off, and occasionally our meetings would devolve into a bunch of half-baked ramblings.

Coordinating meetings and workdays was difficult due to our group size and our class loads. We all had many of our other classes, projects, and jobs that made it difficult to get us all in one place at one time. 

We strove to include everyone in the process, but it wasn't always simple. People got sick, cars broke down, or something went wrong.  We also left the final build a little later than we had initially planned.

The time we took off for COVID late in the semester derailed our plans and we scrambled to regroup at the end of the semester. There was a reevaluation of what enemies would be included in the game, with us eventually settling on the seven we came up with.  One was actually scratched due to scrapped gameplay mechanics.

Overall, we had an amazing time this semester and we are very excited to participate in CPI 211 next year.

Special Thanks to Professor Selgrad and all the T.A.'s this semester.

Special thanks to Krishna Palacio for the Minifantasy asset packs.