At A Glance
Media Type: Game
Platform: Web-based
Released: October 2019
Made for: GAMED Fall Game Jam, 2019
Created with: Unity
Coded in: C#
Developers: Cass Aleatory, Leah Blascyzk, & Wesley McWhorter
Media Type: Game
Platform: Web-based
Released: October 2019
Made for: GAMED Fall Game Jam, 2019
Created with: Unity
Coded in: C#
Developers: Cass Aleatory, Leah Blascyzk, & Wesley McWhorter
System Overload is a Bloons-inspired tower defense game that puts the player in command of a full array of technological defenses, from firewalls and file shredders to binary-shooting decompilers. With currency at a premium and a wide variety of viruses and malware trying to corrupt your confidential data, you’ll need to spend your Bitcoin wisely to survive all twenty waves. You have seven unique towers that you can place and upgrade with one click… and you’ll need all of them if you want to avert the System Overload.
System Overload was created for the Fall 2019 MAGD Game Jam, run by the Game & Media Entertainment Developers club at UW-Whitewater. The theme of the jam was Simulation. About a year after the jam, we revisited System Overload and revised it into the game you see today. The game features all-original code, art, sound effects, and music from Leah, Wes, and I.
Working on System Overload taught me a ton about programming for games. This was the very first time I tried to code on a serious project, and learning to work in sync with other coders using collaboration tools like Unity Collab proved to be an immensely valuable experience for me. It also served to help me hone my troubleshooting skills. I had to untangle the relationships between my scripts and those written by others, learn how to reference GameObjects set up differently from the way I usually created mine, and peer review the code of others to fix some of the more persistent bugs. Overall, I developed quite a few of my most-valued collaborative coding skills while working on this game.
I programmed the towers, wrote the tooltip descriptions, made the art for the Bitcoin Miner, and composed the score for this game. Leah programmed everything besides the towers, lead level design, balanced the game, and ported it from Unity to web browser via itch.io. Wes did all the rest of the art, the interface design, the visual special effects, and the sound effects.