Wayward Winds

Lead your crew in an airship carrying supplies and travel to a kingdom in need!

In a kingdom far away, the king has fallen ill and can only be cured from a potion that you possess. Assemble a crew, pick a ship, ready your rations, pick your favourite hat, and set sail across forests, seas, and mountains in order to be the one to cure the king and receive all the riches and glory you can imagine! During your journey, events of all sorts will happen and you have to make decisions that might affect your crew's wellbeing. You're also responsible for managing the rations of your crew and setting the pace of your ship. Run out of food? Stop to hunt, but make sure you have ammo to hunt anything.

This game was developed in Unity for the PC as a college assignment. This is a resource management game where players try to reach their destination with at least 1 crew alive. A team of 4 artists, 1 designer, and 3 programmers worked on this game for 3 months. Throughout the 3 months, the team was learning how to use Unity in C# while developing the game. The project suffered from a scope that was too large and there was not enough time to balance and polish the game so it may suffer from a few bugs and optimization issues. In the middle of development, it was also discovered that team members were using different project settings. Design-wise, since it was a data heavy game, we tried to minimize the amount of text shown in the GUI and integrated controls as much as we could to the ship itself.

This game was many firsts for me; working in Unity, using C#, working in a group and holding the Lead Programmer role. Being a leader helped me learn that I have to be aware of the project's progress at all times and to ensure that the project's scope is within the team's means. I made the mistake of pitching the design of the game without knowing the amount of content required. However, due to the nature of the game, I learned how to save game data, manipulate strings, and use the UI system of Unity early on in my studies which equipped me with plenty of knowledge for future projects.

This game is available to download at the bottom of this page.

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Role

Lead Programmer

Contributions

Below are the details and my thoughts on my contributions to this project.

Gameplay

• Rations system
  • Players can set the rations given to each individual crew member. The larger the rations, the slower the crew's health drops, but the faster your food amount drops.
  • Rations menu is opened by clicking on the rations room in the ship.
• Pace system
  • Players set the pace of the ship which affects the crew's health and the rate that distance is travelled.
  • Pace is changed by clicking on the pace room. The sprites in the room will change accordingly to indicate the current set pace.
• Rest system
  • Resting increases the crew's health, but adds days to your journey. Food is required and consumed in order to rest.
• Crew health system
  • Crew's health drops overtime and is affected by the ship's pace, each crew's rations, as well as decisions from random events.
  • Setting up this system was overwhelming at first and balancing was tricky for me as there were a lot of numbers involved and there was not enough time in development for the designer to help with the balancing.
• Save system
  • The progress of the journey, pace, rations, food, ammo, gold, and crew health are saved.
  • Data is retained even after the game is closed and players can load their data from the main menu. Only one game data can be saved at a time.
• Pause mechanic
  • This was the first time I created a pause mechanic in a game.
  • It taught me to standardise the way values that change over time in order to make pausing and resuming a game easier.

UI

• Main game
  • Pace menu
  • Rations menu
  • Rest menu
  • Captain's Log
    • The captain's log serves as a reminder the current settings that the player has for that run. All the information depends on the setup that the player chose to start with before the journey(hat bonus, ship type, crew names).
  • Crew health
    • Each crew's name and health can be seen in a menu that pops up when the player hovers over their silhouette.
    • The colour of each crew's silhouette also changes based on their health.
• Setup menu
  • Setup allows players to name their crew members, choose and name their ship, adjust how much food and ammo they want to start with, and the captain's hat which offers different bonuses. Their ship and hat choice is reflected in the sprites shown in the main game.
  • The setup menu was created and coded entirely by myself. I learned to use a lot of Unity's UI during this part of development.