Flame Academy - A Red-Hot Puzzle RTS

Flame Academy is a top-down tile-based puzzle real-time-strategy where the player must control legions of ash-minions to set the world ablaze and pass their pyromancy exams.

Flame Academy was made as a predecessor to FOGO, with the same team and same roles. Before the final semester, we decided to see if this game would work as a long-term project. By making this prototype, we realized that the formula wouldn't work well in a fully produced game, and decided to make FOGO instead, though the development process of Flame Academy's alpha was still a valuable learning experience.

My main responsibilities for this project were the tile and fire systems, essentially handling the states of each tile and how they inform worker activity, as well as controlling the spread of fire across tiles and ensuring that all visuals were kept updated accordingly. Additionally, I helped with the design of several of the levels.

The main programming challenge of Flame Academy was, unlike FOGO, the tiles required logic too complex for Unity's tile map system, so I had to hand-code one that could handle the systems we needed. The number of tiles in a given scene meant that this new system had to be very efficient, which put a huge focus on runtime optimization.

Flame Academy's repository can be found on this GitHub page.