Siege

Siege was concepted and prototyped in two weeks for a cooperative game seminar that I attended to in the first year of the Utrecht School of Art and Technology course.

Prototyped crudely in DarkBASIC, it was still able to gain attention amongst its competition by a rock-solid game design, designed by the 6 man strong team. Realizing the balance is what would empower the two-player experience, most of the time went into ensuring two players were absolutely required to stand a chance against the hordes of goblins, orcs, ents and giants attacking the castle.

The goal was to defend the castle from these attackers by employing your basic bow & arrow, or by using the highly powerful two-player weapons. These two-player weapons need ammo, that needs to be retrieved by a single player, then loaded by both players. At that point, the weapon can be fired by either player.

Available weapons included the catapult, an area-of-effect weapon, a ballista that worked like a shotgun on impact, boiling oil that could kill enemies at the gates and burning arrows that could damage ents.

Audio design was executed by the team itself due to a lack of time, as well as the voice acting, which added an hilarious layer as goblins screamed 'Aah! It burns!' in our voices.

Sadly, the version of Siege that was considered the final version was lost in time, and screenshots are all artefacts that remains of this enigmatic project nowadays.

Siege was my first collaboration with Laurens de Gier, who I've worked with quite oftenly since. It also introduced me to Daniël Harmsen. Besides those two, the team consisted of Emiel Bransen, Christiaan Ribbens and Charlotte Witsenburg. My role in the project was project lead, designer and developer.