Farm Vs Aliens
Overview
A tower defense where the farm fights back. Eleven animal heroes, each with their own ammo, skills and evolutions, against everything the aliens send at them.
Game Programmer · hero systems
I built the whole hero system using scalable structures and patterns that let the rest of the team add new heroes quickly without piling up technical debt.
The game won Google's Indie Games Fund in 2023 and was selected as one of the top 10 in Latin America Games.
In practice that meant one hero model with its stats resolved through a single pipeline, where multipliers, elemental bonuses and percentage buffs all enter the same way.
I also did the VFX work for the skills, taking bought particle assets and reworking them in Unity's particle system and animator: explosions, bullet trails, merge effects, kill splash, ice, waterfall and rain.
- Google Indie Games Fund, 2023
- Top 10, Latin America Games
- Eleven heroes shipped on one system
- New heroes addable without engineering time
My contributions
Hero architecture
- Designed the hero model and its base ScriptableObject with skill trees, so a hero is defined by data and a board script rather than by a new system each time.
- Built one stat pipeline resolving multipliers, elemental bonuses and percentage buffs, then refactored every existing skill boost into it. That is DRY applied where it pays most: a new buff became a value in an asset instead of another branch in eleven classes.
- Reworked damage and bonus damage into a state model with buff support, and pooled objects per card so a match holds its allocations flat rather than instantiating through a wave.
Eleven heroes on one system
- Built chicken, dog, cow, pig, sheep, horse, bat, rat, turtle, salamander and reindeer individually, each with its model, board script, ammo, skills and evolutions.
- Built each hero's signature ability on top of the shared stat and damage systems instead of as one-off code, so the bat swarm, the rat blizzard, the turtle shield and heal, the salamander fire wall, the pig area stun, the horse push and align and the reindeer circling laser all resolve through the same pipeline as an ordinary attack.
Shooting and projectiles
- Wrote one generic shootable-object behaviour covering radial, guided, vertical and boomerang movement, with the movement type selected as data. Projectile variety became configuration rather than a subclass per shot.
- Built directional and radial field of view alongside melee in single-target and area forms, all resolving through the same targeting model.
- Handled the collision cases that decide whether combat feels fair: bullets against destructibles, bouncing shots, and the guard preventing a single projectile from registering twice on one enemy.
Enemies
- Built the enemy state machine with its movement, collision and depleting health bar.
- Built freeze, slow, stun, bleed, charm and push with splash as a single status-effect system that any enemy can carry. Each effect is one component applied to the enemy at runtime, so an enemy does not need its own version of freezing and a new effect works on every enemy the day it is written.
- Implemented modifications at boss behaviour and built the boss health-bar UI.
VFX, built by hand
- Took bought particle assets and reworked them in Unity's particle system and animator, tuning emission, timing and colour per skill so each effect read against the game's own art.
- Explosions, bullet trails, merge effects, kill splash, ice, waterfall and rain.
- Built floating damage numbers, critical icons, doubles and per-element multiplier feedback, so damage reads correctly at a glance during a busy wave.
- Built a sound handler resolving per hero and per ammo type rather than per prefab, which kept audio consistent as the roster grew.
World and progression
- Object layering, per-chapter backgrounds and a day/night pass with sun and clouds.
- Rarity-based chests, match rewards and the reward planning model behind them.
- Fixed bugs across the game throughout the project, including the progression blockers that reached production: the day-10 wall, boss spawning, and enemies entering from the wrong side.
Gallery
Project details
- Studio
- blu studios
- Genre
- Tower Defense
- Engine
- Unity
- Released
- June 2023
- Platforms
- Android, iOS
- Stack
- Unity · C# · Systems Architecture · Combat Systems · Scriptable Objects · VFX · Mobile
