I believe this week went well as I produced good work and even though not all the work was kept in the game I still learned from it and they helped improve the game.
Item gathering & Inventory
This was intended to be a feature so when the play either collected or bought a power up the power up would be store in the players inventory, however after player feedback and QA test we found that players seemed to forget about their inventory and instead of using their power ups instead collected mass amounts and then used their inventory after they had the max amount of power ups, because of this I decided to remove the inventory, the item gathering also had to be changed a little to make sure the players instantly used any power up they had collected, I kept the old files in case after players tried the new system they disliked it or preferred the old system which I believe this was a good idea as it would have saved me time if I had to add it back into the game. I believe these were good changes to make to the game as it made the power ups more useful and didn’t break any fundamentals of the game, and a inventory isn’t required for a tower defence game as my research has shown so this wouldn’t become a problem. Also after play tests players said it was an improvement from before, so even though players disliked the inventory system it was helpful in the development of the game as it was replaced by a better system.
Shop updates
This week I made a few adjustments to the shop making it more of what would be expected in a game, So i relocated the objects for the items in the shop to make them appear neater and how players would expect to find them, this was a simple task to do and made a huge improvement according to my player feedback. I also changed the sprites for the objects in the room so that they had sprites that made sense to what the player was buying this was a huge improvement from the place holder sprites we were using before as during play tests players we confused to what each item was. I also added 2 new upgrades from player suggestions so the player can buy two ways of healing the base either partly or fully which although made the game easier it also made it more enjoyable as our QA tests showed.
This week I also fixed some bugs to improve the game such as removing flickering sprites and fixing some items in the shop costing more energy than they should have.
For next week
I’m going to add a shops display window, this way it will be easier for the players to tell that they are in the shop; it will also fill up a large amount of the screen and make the shop more shop like while also giving it a better appearance as players said the screen seemed abit empty.
An very important part of my research showed that it is important for a game to have sound as it makes the game more interesting to play, and because audio is so commonly used players will be expecting audio when they play our game, because of this when audio has been created I’m going to add it into the game as it will be a huge improvement.
I’m also going to fix some problems with the game being windowed. When the player buys items in the shop and gets a windowed message it causes the game to no longer be in full screen and forces windowed mode and because of this some of the screen is missing; if the player also pauses the game that causes the same issue; to resolve this I could either try fixing the reasons to why the game is going into windowed such as replacing the windowed message with drawn text and try fixing the pausing issue. Or I could make the game always in windowed mode as when the game is played on a web browser it won’t become a problem, this may be the easiest way to fixing the problem which will give me time to work on other content, it would also be an improvement from full screen so I will most likely use this method.
Evolution of Defence 