2-Player Haunted House RTS – Class Project 2015
Download and Play
My role: Game Designer, Solo Artist/Animator
Technologies: Unity, Photoshop
(Me playing against myself, not perfectly reflective of intended gameplay)
Cauldron Command is a competitive RTS. You play as a gravedigger building an army of Halloween monsters. Dig up parts from graves that spawn randomly in the middle of a field and bring them back to your haunt where they can be used to directly summon monsters on an altar or placed in cauldrons that provide a slow but never-ending stream of them. Parts can also be combined in the lab to create stronger minions. Try to build up a strong enough army to destroy your opponent’s haunt before they destroy yours!
I worked on Cauldron Command with a small team for my Game Concept and Production class at Northeastern University. As a game designer, I worked on balancing both the different monsters against each other and the risk vs. reward gameplay revolving around gathering parts and choosing between short and long-term unit production and quality.
As an artist, I went for a retro look inspired by classic Halloween-variety horror monsters like skeletons, zombies, witches, wolfmen, etc. since it was a good fit for the summoning and combination mechanics. We also introduced a really fun visual effect where units will run up and stack up on top of each other in large fights adding excitement and visual interest.
As it stands, Cauldron Command is a working prototype that would benefit from refinement and polish, particularly in the visuals which are compromised by scaling issues with Unity. I don’t have any plans to continue work on it but may revisit the concept in the future.