Crystal Wars

Crystal Wars was the final games project for my Bachelor of Science (Games Technology) at Murdoch University. It was completed in 2006 over a period of 12 months by myself and three others: John Chillemi, Jeremy Dixon and Felix Wai. Under the banner of “My First Gorilla Studios”, we created a game that (we hoped) was capable of revolutionising the strategy game genre.

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Please note we do not own the copyright to the music used in this trailer.

At the time we’d been playing a lot of Defence of the Ancients and so Crystal Wars was heavily influenced by that – the mechanics of DotA but built from the ground up, purpose-engineered instead of a mod. We dreamed big and designed robustly, but at the end of it all, we struggled constantly against a poor choice of engine (the Torque RTS engine), and were constantly limited by the constraints that it imposed on us.

The icons I designed for the Crystal Wars user interface

My responsibilities on the Crystal Wars project were mostly in the fields of design and art. I designed a lot of the units, mechanics and world background story for the game, handling nearly all of the concept art, and a large portion of the modelling and texturing. Alongside this I contributed to GUI design, general art direction and unit ability scripting.

I created, modelled and textured a number of in-game assets

Crystal Wars was not ever finished but was a great success for all of us, winning us the Honeywell Industrial IT Prize for the year, as well as netting the Top Project award based on Murdoch staff votes. The final product was solid enough to run a live demonstration at our final project presentation, something which we remain very proud of. To this day it is still held up to other Games Technology students at Murdoch University as an example of a polished, well-made games project.

A selection of my concept art for the project

I still believe the mechanics underpinning Crystal Wars are solid, and think that if it were tackled by a large team with the right tools then it has the makings of an excellent game. If you’d like to learn more about it, please feel free to download the hi-resolution PDF manual (78 MB).