Hey guys its been 2 years since I've made Nasu Run, and I've been wanting to make another NegNasu fan game with my improved knowledge and skills I've picked up from working on a bunch of other projects. Over the past year it has somehow become my biggest and most complete project I've ever worked on LOL and after a long journey, Nasu Garden Defender 1.0 is finally done!

Nasu Run

Back in 2023, I made this simple infinite runner game. I just graduated from school and I was thinking about the concept during finals LOL

I had many ambitious plans for this game, even though it was so simple.  The plans were maybe toooo ambitious. 

The thing I always notice when I work on a project for too long is that as my coding knowledge increases, I look back at old code I wrote and I'm just like "this is unreadable and unmanageable", and it was a huge pain to add and modify things. And when that old code is in the same project I'm currently working on, it leads to motivation loss and burnout. Making multiple smaller projects to learn over time is definitely the way to go. 

So instead of adding the updates I planned for Nasu Run, I decided to make a new project.

Nasu Garden Defence (iteration 1)

Speaking of being too ambitious, it's like I didn't learn a thing from the previous project LOL. The things I had planned for this game were over the top and beyond my skill level for sure. But this is all in hindsight, because at this point I had no idea.

I wanted to make the game somewhat similar to Nasu Run, I wanted it to have the feeling that this is an "upgraded" version. So the layout of the game is generally the same, with the same walls and background and enemies coming from the side. 

So the idea was instead of continuously running, the enemies would be coming towards you and you have to defend the garden. A similar concept to Plants vs Zombies but less tower defence and no grid.

Upgrades

I wanted upgrades similar to roguelikes, specifically Risk of Rain 2, where you could collect a bunch of items, have some of them be stackable, and they all work together to create a different experience with each run. 

This was one of the main reasons why this iteration didn't work out. Adding items and upgrades like that is just hard, especially when I had no plan and was just throwing in new weapons and items when I came up with the idea. This lead to more and more spaghetti and a huge mess, making it exponentially more difficult to add each additional feature.

Wave Design

I have to say that level design and wave design are not particularly my strong suit when it comes to game design. I'm not terrible at it but this is a tough task with my idea. 

Early on, the design is not too bad to manage. The player can only have a handful of weapons, and therefore not as many permutations to consider when designing the waves. But as the game goes on, the player gets more upgrades and weapons and suddenly there are too many permutations to consider. In some tests, the wave would be way too easy and boring, and in other tests the wave would be near impossible.

This is really just a skill issue, it's not an impossible task. Its very common in dungeon crawlers and other roguelike/roguelite games to not know and plan for exactly what stuff the player currently has at any given moment. 

It was just something that I was not ready for. I'm all for pushing myself beyond my limits, but sometimes things are too far out of reach and that's okay, I'll get there eventually if I keep learning.

What Went Right?

It wasn't all doom and gloom when it comes to iteration 1 not working out. There were a lot of things that were great, and many features even made it into the final iteration of the game.

Roguelite Upgrades

 
I loved the idea of having outside run upgrades like in many roguelites that make you more powerful the more you play. I think I cooked with the upgrades being on pedestals instead of in a menu, it made it feel a lot more immersive. But maybe I overcooked by having options like music and sound volume be there as well. 

I took big inspiration for the pedestal upgrades from Spell Disk. I really liked how it felt like the upgrades were part of the world, compared to how Vampire Survivors did it. However I did like the fact that Vampire Survivors had free rerolls, and I preferred being able to put multiple points into an upgrade. So my implementation ended up having a bit of both, and this really worked out so it ended up in the final iteration (that I'll talk about later).

Vampire Survivors (Left) | Spell Disk (Right)

Pick From 3

This is a very common design choice in games where you get stronger, especially in roguelikes. It shows up in Vampire Survivors, Spell Disk, League of Legends - Swarm, Hearthstone Arena, etc. Its very satisfying and it gives the player agency and its a choice that doesn't take too much brain power (unless you want it to).  Its also an easy way to make it so each run can be more unique.

Stats

I liked the idea of being able to increase stats to add further variance and uniqueness to each run. However in this version I made it so you can get as many upgrades as you want and not put a limit on each. I thought this was cool because if you were lucky you could get some game breaking combos and that would be fun. 

Turns out game breaking combos are not supposed to actually be game breaking, its just supposed to feel like it LOL

Nasu Garden Defender (Final Iteration)

I only changed the name cuz I didn't wanna delete the other version lol.

The pivot from the previous iteration was a pretty big change, it only somewhat resembles iteration 1. 

The biggest change game design wise is a shift to be closer to Vampire Survivors. I am  pretty familiar with the mechanics of the game, and similar games like Holocure and League of Legends Swarm, so I felt like I could plan a lot of the game ahead of time, which is something I learned I should do based on the previous iteration. 

But I didn't want to just make a clone of another game, I wanted to actually have to think about the game design and not just blindly follow another game. I also wanted the game to be more unique.

So I added the garden to defend, along with the objective of keeping yourself alive. I thought this was a good feature to have because it matched the idea and objective of the previous iteration  - save the eggplant garden. 

Planning 

The previous iteration taught me that planning is important when it comes to making a bigger game. Most of my other games were smaller and had a lot less features, so I haven't really been planning. But it really does make a big difference. The code was more neat, and it made adding new weapons a breeze when I knew what features the weapons would have ahead of time.

Garden Defence

 This part of the game is inspired from a game that some of my classmates made for their project when I was in school for game dev. It was a game about defending a campfire from snowmen that spawned outside the map and walked towards the center where the fire was.

In that game, more powerful weapons and items spawned further away from campfire, incentivising the player to roam away from the fire more. But that was a multiplayer co-op game, so there could still be someone defending the fire. 

So for Nasu Garden Defender, I incentivise players to wander away from the garden by placing sunflowers that drop rewards around the edge of the map. And instead of leaving another player to defend, I added a garden barrier drop that temporarily defends the garden for you. Also one of the weapons helps with defending as well.

Weapons and Combat

I stuck to the same type of combat as the other iteration, but I had to modify it to not only aim towards the right but auto aim. For weapons, I limited the slots in the inventory to 6 weapons and 6 stats, and have these be upgradable instead of stacking multiple items at a time. 

The weapon evolution is directly from Vampire Survivors, but the stats being the requirement to evolve comes from League of Legends Swarm. 

Stats from League of Legends Swarm

Pick from 3 

It kinda made sense to keep this in if I was pivoting to be more like Vampire Survivors. One thing I decided to do was use an online tcg custom card creator for the selection backgrounds. It made a huge difference in looks compared to the old selection.