I feel the first week on working on the game was successful as lots of content was produced for the game earlier than expected. I believe these were good additions to the game and work well this is because they have no problems and from my research are mechanics that feature well in tower defence games; most also had positive player feed back. I believe the content developed will have to go though some more play tests to see if player feed back suggests any changes some be implemented such as changing the health of the enemies; most changes shouldn’t become a problem later down the line as most would require a simple value change, I believe its a good idea for us to develop content that can be edited upon later if suggested by play testers to improve the game. I also finished weeks work earlier than anticipated this gave me enough time to start working on content such as the pause menu early.
Pause menu
The pause menu worked well with the method I used of deactivation from finding it in game makers help page and it work how it was originally intended to however to improve upon it next time i would plan on adding more features to the menu other than simply pausing the game, for example I get the chance I will add features such as help and quit to the menu; this way if new players don’t understand how to play the game they can find out by simply pausing the game this would make the pausing a much more effective and useful feature. From my research pause menus generally have more features than just resume so adding features would be welcomed as this would make the game more like a tower defence and so would be a good improvement.
Enemy Health
Adding health to the enemies worked well for our game as the game was to easy when the player could simply shoot one bullet and then change target, by adding more health it made the game more interesting. This feature could be improved by having enemies with a range of health as from my research I found that tower defence games always have enemies with a range he health
The inventory system
The inventory system was scrapped early in development. This is because of a range of reasons such as the game had problems drawing the inventory, players often forgot they had an inventory and so didn’t use it too much. We also felt an inventory doesn’t really suit our game and so because of that and the other reasons we removed them. If we were going to create another inventory system I would change the maximum amount of items the player could carry to a much lower number, this would force players into using them more often rather than collecting large amounts and not using them, I would also create a message so once the player had gotten the max carry limit the game would give them a message to remind them that they have the inventory; this would make it harder for the player to forget about it.
Item pick up
Item pickup had a range of changes made during progression such as from being store into the players inventory after they had been collected to once the inventory was removed changed so once each power up was collected they instantly worked instead, this change was different to the original plan for the item pick up however was an improvement from the first. If i were going to recreate this feature for another game I would use the same methods as I didn’t experience any problems with the 1st and 2nd versions of the item pick up and I can’t think of anyways to improve them either.
Score
The score system for the game works very well as it works exactly as planned and has no errors or problems, the initial 5 energy per energy has been chanced to 1 as this makes working out values easier for both the players and developers when it comes to creating the shop and buying items. Because of the changes that have already been made I don’t see any reason to why any changes would be needed .
Saving
The room saving was a successful part of the game and almost worked as expected however we didn’t consider the storage space that the save file would use, this caused problems when the game was played on a computer that was reaching its storage limit, because of this we will have to inform the player the required amount of space needed to play the game so the player will know to make space if any is needed. Adjustments may be needed to the scripts after the menus are created.
If I were to make any changes next time I would follow an online tutorial to make a inventory system that works better as the one I used had a range of problems and so it was removed. I would also look into having a save button so the player can freely save the game whenever they like rather than when the player enters the room.
Evolution of Defence 