Tales of Valoris: Swallow's Defenders
Developed by Digital Scorpion Interactive using Unity Engine
Swallow’s Keep is a place of great prosperity; however, not all lands share in its wealth, and it has caught the eye of ambitious adversaries. As the player, you’ll be the Commander of a small army tasked with preserving peace and order. Can you defend your home against the bandits?
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Trailer
My Role
I have been the Lead Developer for Digital Scorpion Interactive for the entirety of this project. In this role I have not only been a major part of coding the many gameplay elements and systems of this game but also responsible for a team of up to 4 other Gameplay Programmers at a time working on this project. This required making tasks for our 2-week Sprints, ensuring these tasks were assigned, as well as reviewing completed work to ensure it met our specifications.
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Along with our programming of the Gameplay and Systems needed for other teams to do their work, my team also took on the role of implementing all of the Art Assets from the Sprite sheets that the Art team created. This included the Character Animations, VFX, creation of shaders, and UI elements.
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As the only Lead with any experience publishing a mobile game, I was also the one to create and upload builds for both iOS and Android.
This game had an initial release in January 2024 on mobile and has since been released on Steam with our new expansion content with the mobile expansion releasing soon.
Defenders
In Tales of Valoris, we have 13 defenders with unique mechanics. An Archer is the base unit that is cheap to buy and is able to shoot arrows quickly to damage any Enemies in their lane. As you play through the campaign you will unlock more to play with. Most unique of which are the Mages and Healer.
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Lightning Mage - Summons Lightning Strikes anywhere on screen in an X pattern to deal damage to all enemies hit.
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Fire Mage - Spreads Damage Over Time to nearby enemies when his projectiles hit.
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Ice Mage - Applies a stacking slow effect to any enemies hit by her projectiles.
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Healer - Can heal Defenders within a defined area around her
Upgrades
Upgrading a unit in the Journal will increase the maximum level that a Defender can be upgraded to within each level using the gold that you collect to place Defenders in the play area. ​
Some examples of what Defender upgrades do would be increased Attack Speed for the Archers, Increased Slow Debuff for the Ice Mage, and increased healing and range for the Healer.​
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To visually signify an upgraded unit, we used Blend Trees to swap the sprites for different color variants and showed the character's level within our radial wheel.
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Heroes
We also have 5 Heroes that can be selected from that each bring a unique ability that can turn the tide of a battle.
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Halvesh - Adds a piercing effect to all projectiles so that it can deal damage to more enemies.
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Lorek - Increases damage of projectiles.
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Vhenna - Reduces received damage by a large percentage.
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Grahnir - Provides a large Heal over time to all Defenders.
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Raveras Redeemed - Temporarily confuses enemies so that they turn around and walk the wrong direction.​
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Heroes are unlocked through beating the Act 1 bosses on certain difficulties and can be upgraded in the Journal to permanently increase their stats.
This page is a work in progress. Check back later for more information.
Endless Mode
The only special game mode in Tales of Valoris is the Endless mode. This was an idea I came up with to introduce more replayability. This mode is set up with multiple ways to scale difficulty to ensure that at some point the player will lose. The objective was to survive the longest and make it to the top of our leaderboard.
Scaling is done through 4 systems increasing the difficulty together over time:
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Waypoints could be set by our Level Designers where they could specify a certain number of seconds and the percentage chance for each enemy to spawn at each level.
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Bosses would spawn every 5 minutes and would increase by 1 level after each spawn. After reaching their max level of 5 they would start scaling their health and damage by 10-15% infinitely.
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Every 1 minute the maximum number of enemies that spawn at once would increase. After reaching the maximum of 5, it would start increasing the minimum number of enemies that spawn at once every 4 minutes.
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The time between enemy spawns had a minimum and maximum interval that would increase and decrease over time following an angled down sin curve. This would ensure that there were certain times where more enemies are spawning and also give some breaks where less spawn. This would eventually reach a minimum of 1 second between spawns where it would stay permanently.
This page is a work in progress. Check back later for more information.