Defender of Mankind is a cockroach-killer simulator. It takes place in a dingy, dark, New York City apartment after the player returns home to find the power has gone out. As you move your flashlight across the room, hoping to get a better look around, the cockroaches get startled and emerge from their hiding places around the apartment. Click to kill all the cockroaches before they take over your space.
Mediums used: Unity, C#
PRODUCTION
This was an individual project from start to finish and was almost entirely self-taught (my only assistance was Google and profusely asking questions of my peers). Through frustration and lots of dead ends, I started to pick up the Unity interface as well as the C# coding language. This has become one of the most rewarding projects I have completed on the basis that it took a few months (June 2019 - August 2019) to complete and the amount of effort that went into teaching myself an entire new coding language from scratch.
In order to win the game, the player must click to kill all of the cockroaches as they emerge from their hiding spots around the play area. If there are more than 30 cockroaches on the screen at once, the player has 15 seconds to reduce the number below 30 or lose the game.
Here is another example of the game in practice, showing the frantic player and the surprise of over 60 cockroaches spawning at one time.
I believe that showing the road blocks of getting to an end point is vital to the process of creation, innovation, and adaptation. Because of this, I have included videos of some failures along the way to creating my final product. There were many more than are shown here, and they all helped me get to the end point.
One of the major issues I had was getting the cockroaches to move with a jitter using Perlin noise. The mathematics of Perlin noise in addition to the translation of it to C# was incredibly frustrating and led to many issues as can be seen above. The cockroaches would swing around spastically and would not follow a straight line.
While frustrating at the time, I find it hilarious now, especially since I was able to figure it out in the end.
Another issue I ran into was with the spawner location. The spawners were triggered through an interaction with an invisible collider in the light beam of the flashlight, but weren't working properly in the beginning. Instead of getting triggered when the flashlight entered the spawner, it would trigger when leaving, which didn't make sense. In the process of trying to fix this issue, some wires got crossed and the spawner in the fridge ended up triggering the one under the bed instead.
This project taught me more about how I learn and work than any project before. I had high standards for the final product, and was proud of myself that I was able to accomplish such a massive undertaking in such a short amount of time. This project opened up many avenues for me to learn more about my passions, the projects I enjoy, and showed me the value of trial and error (and error, and error, and error...)
Failure is a part of learning, and this project allowed me to embrace failure, learn from it, and, most importantly, how to grow through failure.
