Big Oil Conquers the Mole People is a "tower offense" game that turns classic tower-defense on its head. Send in droves of oil-hunting robot-tanks to gather precious oil from oil wells which are heavily guarded by stationary towers built by aggressive mole people who are determined to keep you away at all costs.
Big Oil began life as a basic concept long before the DigiPen course for which I made it as an assignment. I first got the idea while playing Team Fortress 2's "Mann vs. Machine" tower-defense game mode. I asked myself in the middle of the game: "What would it be like to be the one sending in the waves of units to attack the base rather than being the one defending it?" I developed a mental image of such a game, and that mental image became the groundwork for Big Oil.
Big Oil began life as a basic concept long before the DigiPen course for which I made it as an assignment. I first got the idea while playing Team Fortress 2's "Mann vs. Machine" tower-defense game mode. I asked myself in the middle of the game: "What would it be like to be the one sending in the waves of units to attack the base rather than being the one defending it?" I developed a mental image of such a game, and that mental image became the groundwork for Big Oil.
Designer Commentary Video
In this video, I give some additional insight into the development of Big Oil and discuss some of the problems it faced during development.
Post-Mortem Report
A brief report on what I think went well, went poorly, and would have liked to see in Big Oil.