Gather and Defend

This is an ongoing project for my university’s game development club, Conjure.

Gather and defend is a mix between Plants vs Zombie’s gameplay style and Age of Empire’s resssource management. You place units on a grid to defend yourself from hordes of monsters. You can place offensive units, or resource collecting units. You must manage which resources to prioritize to upgrade the units that fit best with your strategy.

So far, we have 16 units and 7 monsters. That’s around half of what we plan on implementing by release. Of course, some units have more complex mechanics than others and require a lot more time and resources to develop. For example, we want to implement a special type of unit called “Cursed Unit” that require an entire new resource to create. These units would also have special combat mechanics that might require to branch off from existing systems.

The game follows a linear progression. You unlock a new level with every victory. There are 3 islands, which act as “worlds”. Each island has a different theme, different monsters and sometimes new mechanics that spice up the difficulty as you progress.

For the art, we are going for a “programmer” style as we do not have many artists in the club. I have had a lot of fun designing unit placeholders to showcase my work before settling on definitive sprites. Creative skills are as important as technical skills when it comes to game development!

We plan on releasing the game by Summer 2026. Here is our dev roadmap!