I decided to see what I could make up for the Week of Awesome V here on GameDev.net.

My time is rather limited by work, and I came to the party a few days late, but we'll see what I can rustle up.  So far, I've put a little under 5 hours into the project.  I'm off Saturday and have a shorter shift on Sunday, so I'll be trucking away to try to wrap everything up on those days.

It's just me participating.

I'm using Unity3D with C#, MagicaVoxel for art (if you can call it art), and probably BFXR for sound effects (if I can get to it).

THE VISION

I've chosen the themes "Castles" and "Alien Invaders".

The game is a 3D, voxel-based over-the-shoulder shooter, with simple WASD/arrow-key movement and mouse-based third-person aiming.

You fly a little alien hovercraft to invade a castle, slaying the little knights and their contraptions, left-clicking to shoot.  It's a small invasion; why send more than one alien when you're so technologically advanced?

While your camera will let you look up and down, your shots always come out of the front of the hovercraft, instead of angling up or down with the camera.

This gives it a simple, arcade-y feel.

I plan on implementing three different kinds of enemies:

Swordsmen move towards you and swing their blades at you, dying in 1 hit.

Lancers keep further distance, throwing arcing spears at you and dying in 2 hits.

Archers keep as much distance as they please, firing true-flying arrows at you from afar.

If I can get to it, I want to implement...:

Trebuchets or ballistae.  Medieval siege weaponry that swivels on the ground, rotating but never moving, aiming towards the player and periodically firing fat, slow projectiles that throw the player and even the nearby enemies away and deal damage.

Destructible castle mechanics.  I'd like to design levels such that the player must blow holes in walls and go through them to reach new areas, and may carve their own path to the interior of the castle.

PROGRESS SO FAR

Scrambling to implement stuff I've probably implemented a hundred times in Unity before, I've got:

- Third-person camera that slides along walls and has some light smoothing applied.  All that good stuff.

- Hovering.  The player model (currently a large cube) is suspended above ground and smoothly maintains the same height above ground while going up or down slopes.  I want to make the player overshoot the hover height if they land with high velocity, then bob up, and possibly tilt a little during it, because it all looks very stiff right now - but that's one of those polish features I'm not going to focus on until I know I can get the core mechanics down in time.

- Basic shooting for the player (hold left-click to keep firing; projectiles travel straight forward until they hit something or expire).

- Basic enemy following AI, health, and death.  They alert to the player if they're close enough, and try to keep the player within the desired range (lancers want about 10-15 feet, swordsmen want melee range, and archers will probably be standing still at all times).

Tomorrow, I'll try to make good use of 2-4 hours to get some art going, take some screenshots, and get the enemies dealing some good old fashioned Medieval hurt to the player.  If core mechanics can be wrapped up nicely tomorrow, I'll have Saturday and Sunday to focus on content, polish, a tutorial, and audio.

Time is pretty short, so we'll see how it goes.

I participated in the Week of Awesome III and ended up with a game that had no audio and wasn't quite as well-explained as I wanted it to be.

I'm hoping this time around I can temper the scope and crack the whip (at myself) enough to get something finished.