Weekly evaluation (2)

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.

Week evaluation (1) (updated)

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.

Shop Improvements

Because the first shop that I created for the game was very basic I decided to make some improvements such as making it feel more like a shop and removing the windowed text bug that forces the game to go from full screen to windowed.

To remove the widowed mode bug I removed the windowed message this is because it was causing the bug, another reason why I decided to remove the message is because the feature wasn’t something I found that tower defence games did and because of this I decided it would be a good idea to have some text in the shop so I decided that if the player hovered over an item the game would inform them what the items effect was and how much it costs, I decided to add this into the game because lots of tower defence games do this as shown by my research such as bloons so to make sure our game follows the genre conventions of tower defence games our game will also do this as it will be a feature players will expect to see within the game.

From player feedback the shops interface could be improved upon because the interface looked a bit of a mess; so i improved the layout, to do this I decided to relocate the objects so the they looked neater this had positive feed back from players.

To make entering the shop abit more interesting and so the player knew they were entering using Tyler’s sprites I animated the chest sprite to make sure when the player hovered over the chest it opened a little and when the player was in the shop it would be fully open so the player could tell the difference, this was a slight visual improvement to make the game more interesting.

I also decided to remove the place holder sprites that were in the shop as it was no longer needed and could be replaced with a real sprites that Tyler had created this was because the old sprites were never intended to stay in the game as they looked strange, and because they had no variation between what the player could buy if they wasn’t changed it would have been much harder for the player to understand what they’re buying, one reason for doing this is because as my research shows in every tower defence that I looked into they never used the same sprite for different items so because of this I made sure our items each had their own sprite.

Here’s a video showing the update in game, and also the version before the updated change.

shop changes

Shop rewards ideas

For our shop we decided to have the items that the player can by mainly around the theme of evolution and with some base upgrades we did this as we wanted the character to evolve as they progressed so they felt like the were achieving something as they played the game more.

Because as my research showed that tower defences always have ways of protecting the base from damage such as a turret attached to the base, we asked players what types of upgrades they’d want in the shop, players responded with.

Which shows the players wanted ways to heal the base, increase bullet speed, stronger bullets and a turret.

The shop is planned to have permanent effects that will always have an effect on the players character, these make parts of the character evolve such as their speed and bullet strength, these will never be as strong as the temporary effects as we believe that the game would become too easy if they could be permanently unlocked.

The game unlike other tower effects has Temporary power ups that we believe is a good way our game is different from other tower defences as these are effects that are active for a small amount of time and make the player much more powerful. Despite that they are different from what you’d expect from a tower defence they work well and have had positive feed back from play tests, this was inspired from the effects that the player can use in age of war that have a cool down time, these have strong effects, in our game instead of having a tool down time a player must collect or buy a power up, this is to make them more  constant so they will be use more often than the effect in age of war.

The main part of our shop is the evolution button which is the way the player evolves into a new creature this should take around 3 minuets for the player to gather enough energy to evolve and this will take them onto the next level where they will play as a frog-let and face new harder enemies this is because from our research we found that as the player progresses in tower defence games they face new stronger enemies and must keep evolving to defeat them.

Basic shop

Because the main feature of our game is to collect energy and evolve I created a basic shop that would be the means of doing this.

To create the shop as we believe that this would be the easiest way for players to understand how the evolution works using a point system (energy) as most players will be used to buying items in tower defence (Such as bloons tower defense from my research shows.) to improve and expand their characters strength so to keep with the genre conventions we also decided to have a shop to evolve using the energy that is collected after defeating enemies.

To create the basic shop I used a place holder sprite to set onto an object as a way of testing the shop. The shop works by checking if the player had collected enough energy for any chosen item such as a temporarily power up such as more than 19 energy to buy the power up, if the player had enough energy the game would remove 20 energy and inform the player that they had gotten the item, after this the players object is swapped for the respective powered up version of the player with its events. If the player didn’t have enough energy the player would get a message informing them that they needed 20 energy to buy the item.

This method had its uses however it also created some problems that would be needed to be fixed with the complete shop.

When the messages appeared informing the player that they either had enough or to little energy for the item the game would go into windowed mode and not show the entire room, this became a problem because some parts of the interface became missing such as the energy counter at the top left of the screen you could only read gy:X To fix this we’re going to have to remove the windowed messages as they were causing the problem, these could be replaced by draw events to have text appear on the screen for a few seconds and then remove themselves, we believe its a good idea to keep some form of text as text is a huge part of shops in games and so players expect to see some, and so players understand why they can’t get an item and it also makes QA for the shop easier as we can tell if there’s a problem with the shop or just if we don’t have enough money and just don’t realize it.

Another change that would be needed with the shop is having the objects sprites inform the player both what the item is and how much they cost before the player interacts with them, this is because from my research into games such as age of war and other tower defence games inform the player what item they are buying and for how much it costs before they buy the item so because of this the up to date shop will also have these feature.

The shop will also open its own interface and pause the game this is because there will be too much information for the player to read while the base is being attacked so like plants verses zombies the player will be able to pause the game while they read what they want to do next this is to prevent both the base from being damaged while they are reading and too prevent the player from skim reading the information and not taking anything in and later buying/not buying because they misread the information. This was decided after I created some thumbnail sketches and showed players two ideas, the objects always being in game at the bottom of the screen or in a new interface and players preferred in a new interface this is because that way there would be room for text to inform the players what each item does.

Here is a video showing the basic shop that I have created

.basic shop

Item pick up and inventory

Although my research didn’t directly show the use of inventory the player in each of the tower defence games I looked into had an unlimited supply of towers, because of this i was inspire to use an inventory system so the player can store items they have collected and use them later on, because of this we decided that having a inventory could work well for our game so the player can collect and store power ups.

Item pick up was an intended feature in the game so that players could collect power ups and store them in their inventory for use later; however after being developed we soon decided the two didn’t work well in the game for a few reasons: The inventory covered a considerable amount of the top part of the screen which made enemies that spawned above this area harder to see; (even when the the inventory was highly transparent.) this made it easier for enemies to sneak into the base which players found frustrating and annoying. Players gathered the max amount of power ups they could collect before using any. Players waited until large amounts of enemies spawn before using them and forgot they had collect and stored the power ups when they had larger groups of enemies. Players disliked that if they wanted to power up as soon as the item was collected an item they had to go to their inventory and use the item which they considered to be wasting vital time. The inventory also had its share of bugs such as not appearing when the game started.

Because of these reasons the inventory was removed from the game and were replaced by instantly using items if the player either collects or buys power ups which had much more positive feed back from players, because this wasn’t in any tower defence games that I had researched into I didn’t feel like removing this feature would in any way stop the game from being a tower defence and so removing it wasn’t important.

If I was going to create the inventory system again I would follow online tutorials to have a better system as the one I used simple made objects active at the top of the screen after the player had touched a power up or bought one, because of this I believe there would be better methods of doing this, also a tutorial would mean I’d be less likely to encounter bugs over time.

Room Saving

From my research I found a number of tower defence games such as Plants vs Zombies and Cursed treasure don’t touch my gems! use saving I believe that this would be a good feature we could add to our game so the player feels like they are progressing within the game and also so the player can…

To make sure players could feel like they were progressing thought a long game I created auto saving so when the player entered a new room the game would save its self so later the player could continue where they had left off. Because I haven’t done saving before in game maker I thought I’d try and create my own however after facing some issues I used an online video to help me create the saving so it would work correctly in our game.

this video was helpful because it did exactly what I wanted, because this video uses a continue button I will need to add one later into development when I upgrade the pause menu.

Pause Menu

From my research I found that a pause menu is often a part of tower defence games and because of this players may be expecting to find a pause menu on our game, so to keep with the conventions of tower defence games adding a pause menu would be a good idea for our game and would work well with our game as a pause menu doesn’t in anyway brake or worsen the game.

We also found during the play tests we kept attempting to pause the game to discuss content, however we didn’t have a pause menu, which made talking about content harder, because of this we decided a pause menu would be a good idea to add into the game so I create one.

Because I wasn’t sure how to create a pause menu I researched into it, using an online tutorial I found two ways of pausing the game.

With the pause menu I wasn’t sure how I wanted it to work between pausing everything on the screen and so having a still image with some text stating that the game is paused. Or make the screen fully black and state that the game was paused, I decided to go for the latter for a temporary way to pause the game as it didn’t require too much development time to create and would also work well for the basis for a more in-depth menu later in development with features such as help quit and resume as when this is developed more I can place buttons onto the screen that have effects such as quitting the game for example; this wouldn’t be so easy to move onto if i did the first option as have the image freeze and then place menu buttons on top would have made the menu seem out of place which is why I chose not to use that method. Also according to the tutorial I looked at the first method doesn’t pause alarms and because our game uses power ups that use the alarm system with the first method if the players pause the game their power ups would run out, which wouldn’t have been welcomed by players. I did a poll to ask players which idea they liked the sound of most and most said the first option; some voted for the second as they believed it wouldn’t effect their game play much as they wouldn’t often pause the game.

These videos were very useful to me; this is because it gave me positives and negative aspects of each method this made it easier for me to chose which one to use.

Here is the working pause menu in game

pause menu2

Energy System

Because the aim of our game is to evolve we decided that when the enemies were defeated they would drop energy which would be spent in a shop to evolve, because of this I needed a system to make sure the player could get money (energy) to evolve.

To make sure this would work I created a scoring system that is drawn at the top left of the screen and I made it displayed its self as “Energy” I then made sure when the player collected the energy it would +1 to the energy’s score. Energy was created by Sam, so once the player defeated/hit enemies it spawned energy to which because of my coding could be collected and used.

When researching into how in tower defence games the player collects money I found that in most situations the game automatically collects the money for the player, I found that when playing the Plants vs Zombies the game was more interesting than the others in the sense of collecting money as the player had to collect the energy themselves, I believe it was more interesting as it engaged the player into the game more and because of it the had more things to do within the game, because of this I decided this would be the way the player collects their money. (energy)

Below is a video showing my energy code in game.

energy feature

Enemy Health

After our first play test we found the game was fun however there wasn’t any challenge the game was to easy, this was because the enemies only took one spit to kill them, because we felt the game shouldn’t be too easy we decided to make the enemies take a few shots to be defeated, because of this I created a script to make sure they required 4 instead of the 1.

I also decided to add health to the enemies because the tower defences games I researched into all had enemies that required more than one attack to be killed, such as in Plants vs Zombies I found that because zombies required more than shot to be killed made the game more interesting and fun to play rather than everything only requiring one hit to be defeated; because of this I felt like it would be a good idea to have this feature in our game because its expected from tower defence games and also makes them more interesting as shown by my research.

Later in the games development we may add a verity of enemies with a range of health that visually look different, from my research into tower defence games they use different sprites to represent different amounts of health such as in the game bloons the red enemies required one attack while blues required 2 this could be a feature we add to our game to make it more interesting as my research shows this would be effective as it makes the game less repetitive.

Here is the end result.

enemy health