Well Placed (Unity)

(Client Project, February 2023 - May 2023)

Gameplay of Well Placed on PC.

Description

In the second semester of my masters course at Abertay University I took part in a client project for a PhD student to develop a tabletop game called “Well Placed” in video game form, alongside my usual studies. Well Placed is a cooperative resource management game where players are tasked with maintaining a town of settlements and building infrastructure for safe water access, hygenic toilet facilities and crop growth, as well as repsonding ot hazards drawn from the hazard card deck.

I was the sole programmer on the project, working in a team of three alongside a designer and 2D artist. I built the game from scratch in Unity according to the client’s brief and game rulebook, as well as integrating the work done by the other members of the team into the project. I also quickly learned how to build the game for an Android tablet that was provided by the client.

Project Components

Undoing Actions:

One major difference between playing tabletop games in real life and in video game form is that rules and actions can be changed on the fly in real life, whereas those actions have to be explicitly implemented in video games (with the exception of sandbox games like Tabletop Simulator).
To emulate this, I implemented all possible interactions in the game as “Action”, which are added to a list along with any changes to tiles, money, or other stats. This lets the player try out different sequences of actions and the consequences of them in their turn, whilst being able to easily undo them by simply reverting the effects of the action on the in-game stats. Implementing this system also made debugging the game much easier.

Players can plan out their actions and see the effects of them, with the option to undo those actions and try something different with the game’s memory system.

Responsive Controls:

A large portion of development time was spent reaching the base version of the game, which matched the brief and game rulebook provided by the client. With the limited time we had left afterwards, we elevated the gameplay experience by making controls punchy and responsive, which I achieved by using simple transition logic for the in-game camera and player movement. This worked especially well into the tablet version of the game - tapping away on the touchscreen and seeing things happen made the game much more tactile and satisfying to play.

Simple camera transition logic and player movement is used to help the game feel more tactile and reponsive, which is especially effective on the tablet version of the game.