BIOLOGY 452: Field Ecology of Snail-Fungus Interaction
This is not actually a homework report (or is it), but a (local) two-player asymmetric RTS game where you play as Mushroom and Snail that want to consume each other. You are being observed by students from the aforementioned course who are interested in the special abilities that the two species have.
The game is in its 4th week of development by a team of 4. In the past week we focused on gameplay balancing and UI improvements.
[1] Snail can now randomly find little snails around the map that will follow and fight for it. This is the way for Snail to gradually build up an offensive force against Mushroom.
[2] Added landmine for Snail to destroy Mushroom's mycelium and shovel for Mushroom to remove Snail's slime. This set of features gives both side the ability to reclaim previously occupied map regions.
[3] Reduced cooldown for all Mushroom buildings to 1s. We received feedback that the vitality (resource) system is already a major constraint for how often they can place buildings on the map, and it makes no sense to keep the player waiting when their vitality bar already starts to overflow (which happened very often).
[4] Mushroom and Snail now start at random locations on the map (with a preset minimum distance in between). Now the Snail player can no longer memorize the relative position of Mushroom and rush to eat it before it could even place a single building.
[5] Added hand-drawn artworks for the main menu and loading screen. In dual-display mode, different illustrations will be shown based on whether you play as Mushroom or Snail. Loading of game scene takes a little bit of time, and we want to make that waiting time feel more interesting.
In future iterations, balancing adjustments will remain the top priority of our development. As we get closer to finishing all planned new features, we will turn to finalizing the appearance of in-game UI elements.
Builds available for Windows and Mac. The game supports one or two monitors, but playing in dual-display yields the best experience.
