[Steam] Moon Defence

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https://store.steampowered.com/app/1495800/Moon_Defence/​

Moon Defence​

Description of the game
This is a single-player shooter with destructible buildings, stubborn enemies and gloomy landscapes of the largest moons of the Solar System. It's not easy to aim, it's harder to turn around, and it's really hard to get resources. Try to get gigawatts of energy in empty space, where no one will hear your scream. Your turret is assembled from an industrial crane. Your weapon is a hastily converted plasmatron, a laboratory emitter and an experimental energy absorber. Your enemies are the awakened Guardians. Fight them off without leaving the place.

Energy is severely limited, survival in battle is victory. You are moving from moon to moon in this dangerous journey with an uncertain outcome. Keep an eye on the energy budget, pump guns, explore artifacts. And maybe you shouldn't destroy those monoliths.

Game mechanics
The conceptual heir to the very-old-school Paratrooper, perhaps even absurdly simple. It is necessary to turn the barrels in all directions and, with some luck, you will even be able to hit the targets. That is, seriously, there is no level movement for you. It's the enemies moving around you. For some reason, this idea seemed funny and cool to me

Difficulties in game development
Difficulties are the reverse side of simple mechanics. The turret stands still and does not move anywhere. The dialectic here is that you need to attract the player with something else. Graphics, history consist of thousands of little things. Of course, I can't say that I have implemented all the ideas. And what is implemented is not perfect at all. It seems to me that it was possible to add features endlessly, so at some point I decided to stop and release the game.

Interesting places
I tried to reconstruct the most interesting, in my opinion, places of the Solar system:

Hadley Rille
40-meters high monolith at Tsiolkovsky crater (bottom right corner at the photo)
The mysterious hole in the Copernicus crater
Monolith on Phobos
Ice Peaks of Callisto
View of Saturn from Mimas
The Mountain Ring of Iapetus
Naphthalene beaches of methane seas on Titan
Strange Spongy Hyperion
The indescribable Verona Rupes on Miranda
and also fantasized about the appearance of a singularity near the Sun (why not, huh?).

Assetstore help
Oh yeah. Third-party assets have saved me an incredible amount of time during development! Of course, I had to spend quite a lot of effort to integrate assets into the project, but still, this is incomparable with the costs that I would have to do myself.

Versions of Unity
I started development with version 5.3. Then I tried to follow the updates, but I stayed within 5.x. The next big migration was only for version 2018 - and it wasn't too easy, but the new features justified themselves!
The project has been released since version 2018, but I am gradually preparing to jump into 2020 LTS.

My assets from the game
While I was making the game, a lot of ideas for assets appeared, but only two were implemented.
One day I needed a model of an astronaut. I took a great free astronaut model, optimized it, added animations and decided to release it as an asset. Now I need to upgrade my skills in blender in order to release asset updates further.
And during the development, funnels (craters) were needed from explosions. On version 5.6, the bitcoin lagged, so I had to wait for 2018. Well, finally released the Terrain Dynamic Pit asset only for 2020.

Is it hard to make games on Unity?
No, I wouldn't say that. The engine takes on a huge part of the work, and I can only concentrate on the game itself. Of course, you need to know the features of the engine well, but this is in every case.