Voxel Tower

~8 Weeks development time.

Voxel Tower is a tower defense game made as a solo dev using blueprint and UMG. The aim of the game is to defend your own units on their way to the enemy tower by placing turrets to reduce enemy unit's health.

This project was done to test my abilities in designing a full gameplay loop with a user friendly experience in mind.

Voxel Tower was a smaller project that I made to test my abilities of putting together a game with a complete gameplay loop. It's similar in style to the Bloons games mashed with some MOBA elements

I developed a dynamic grid system that can world with any voxel level that I made, with some user defined parameters such as grid size and spacing.

Detected the ground using traces
Placed grid points anywhere that wasnt the enemy path or an object
Can be dragged and dropped into any scene

Unit pathing for both friendly and enemy units was made using a simple spline. enemies would move along the spline on a configurable timeline from both directions.

Friendly and enemy units show health bars only after receiving damage to avoid cluttering the screen, and the enemy tower displays a much larger health bar to match it's scale.

Healthbars are simple and unbinded to avoid frame drops
only displayed after damage is taken
Player's tower health is displayed as a number to be more specific

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Player buildings have defined visuals and specific roles to fill, ranging from radial projectile launchers to support towers.

Booster towers doubled the firerate of adjacent towers
Scatter blasters shot 8 radial projectiles
Snipers had high range and damage, but a low firerate
Cannons are the standard low damage fast firerate building

There was a mountain of tweaking values by fractions of an int to balance the game during the final days of this project. Here are some old development videos that show some of the stages of prototyping.

And this is the prototype by the end of development

Voxel Tower Rebuild

Currently (18/01/25), I have decided to go back and remake Voxel Tower to reach its full potential. The old version used a lot of outdated techniques that make going in and just fixing them harder than just rebuilding it better.

This newer version is taking lessons that I learned from Area 26 and Forgive me not, as well as from games such as Balatro and similar roguelikes (scaling, progression, etc).

Firstly I am focusing on the most common part of the game, the UI, making it more coherent and a much more enjoyable experience for the user. How the game controlled was also a major critisism, so I will be improving on this by making actions such as placement and selling much more smooth.

I've been working a lot on a smoother and more enjoyable user experience, updating the visual style and adding more feedback for the user, such as firing and impact effects and frames.

The base functionality of enemies has been added and can now be easily expanded upon through child actors, and the first defensive building has been added: the Cannon. Next, I'm beginning work on bringing the gameplay loop from the original game.