while trying to get my initial ideas for the game we are working on, i looked into games of the same genre and collected some images of tower defence games i have been using as my research and then i made another which is just specified to the area’s of the game i will be working on, here they are.
as a way to display my ideas with the team and show them how i can imagine our game i drew out my idea’s and then we decided which would look the best, below are our idea’s in their different forms and a chosen look was decided.
To keep track of my work and to always know where I am at and what to do next, I will be using this Gantt I have made to manage my time as most effectively as I can, my Gantt chart is below.
As a way to manage our game without the chance of loosing it and all of our work, also as a way we can reflect back on the work we have done, every day and every new project is saved as a different number to the game, this is good because if any of our games become corrupt we wont have lost anything as we will have one that isn’t too far behind, but as well as different numbers, we have multiple of each number saved in different locations.
To get an idea of how the game should look i made a few thumb nail sketches to show what i am hoping for our game to be like in its final form, here is a thumb nail of level one, it includes things such as what the player does, the base, the enemies and the turret, plus power ups and rare events like bosses and chasers
For my research i am going to look into a range of tower defence games, Tower defence games i will be looking into, include, curse treasure get your hands off my gems!, Age Of War, Plants Versus Zombies, and Bloons. in these games i plan on looking into the mechanics for them,especially the ones that, that make the game exactly how they are, that being all the key things that make the game fit its genre but also unique. Our game is set about Evolution and Growth, this means that we dont only have to look into tower defence games, but games that also incorporate evolution and growth, one game that i have been playing for my research is the game Evolve.
Evolve
Evolve is a game that has the fundamental mechanics which involve evolution as well as growth, at first when playing the game you start off as a small monster that is weaker then other life forms, including humans, then later on you grow to become stronger and bigger, and from being the one at the bottom of the food chain, you then become the one at the top, The aim of the game is fundamentally, what is planned for our game, start weak and then become stronger and grow, and evolve into the greatest species to survive, one mechanic i would like to add to the game is a mechanic where things start to fear the player when the player gets stronger, as this is something that helps show how powerful you have become, and i would like to show that you can easily kill what could before kill you. While I played the game evolve, I saw first hand how much evolving effects the game, and how it changes the whole dynamic for the game, and this is something that i would love to implement into our game, we could make it so the objective is to evolve from something small and insignificant to something large and the top of the chain, and then once you have passed through all these stages you have completed the game.
X-Men
The film series x-men is a great film to research into as it is a series that has massive links to evolution, as almost all the characters are people that have evolved to become more powerful and to better survive rather then the normal human,also as well as showing how we could evolve it shows how we would most likely react if others around us evolve to become stronger beings, and how we would shun them or we would fear them, also from this we can see that one species can evolve in different ways, rather then all the same, and this could be a way we take our game, so we can evolve to become different beings so maybe we choose different power ups so our play through is different to someone else?
Charles Darwin: On The Origin Of Species
The book that Charles Darwin wrote about evolution is a great book for us to research into as it can tell us a lot of needed information, he tells us that, species evolution happens from a struggle for species survival, so they evolve to better live, and the ones that don’t evolve and adapt are less likely to survive and to reproduce.
Tower Defense games
Plants Vs Zombies
While playing the tower defense game Plants Versus Zombies i noticed that this game is unique as while you are defending a tower you are defending multiple ones rather then one lane, this is something i would like to do, like maybe defend a base from different areas, this game has great interfaces and it looks like a professional game rather then most other tower defense games that are indie like, and mostly under developed.
Age of war.
While playing the game tower defence game Age of war, i noticed that the game is quite suited to us, as its about the evolution of war through the ages, and that is directly linked the the idea we are going with which is evolution. this game has a button that costs alot of energy that makes the player change time era, this is what we want, a button that is pressed and makes the player evolve into another species.
Bloons
While playing the game Bloons tower defense, game i noticed that there are a large variety of enemies and this makes the game alot more interesting as it means that while playing there is always something new that will keep the player busy and never getting bored of the game being the same over and over, and this is something that i would love to implement into the game we are making.
for our original idea generation my group got together and we talked about all the different things we could do for a game about growth and evolution, then we started to talk and write all the different things we could do for the game that would fit the genre, above is the mind map we made with the ideas we got about the project.
From the feedback we collected, we told that there were 2 bugs that were effecting peoples playing of the game, and that all round made the game too broken or too easy, we took the feedback we were given constructively and then worked on the bugs and eventually removed them,
Originally I had attempted to remove the bug of being able to double player movement speed but I could not manage to do it without removing bigger pieces of code, so i left it within the game, but then later on I attempted again to see if i could work out a way to fix the problem, and I came up with a working solution that both looks and works perfectly for the game.
Another bug was that the player could break with our right click movement, if they let the player catch up with the mouse, again originally I tried a lot of pieces of code to fix this, none of them making things better, only worse, then I decided to try a new way of going about the code, I managed to do it and now the game works perfectly without this error, and player now catching up with the mouse looks normal and perfect rather then the way it use to look and work.
From our feedback we were told that our random events were a great mechanic for our game, and we should add more in future. That is exactly what we have done, we have added another random event to the game, where an enemy chases after the player rather then the base, this has been given positive feedback as it is a change in mechanics, and it gives the player something new to deal with, while dealing with the other enemies, this also works well with the injury we added to the game, as if you don’t manage to kill the chaser then you will be stunned so other enemies can hurt the base.
Our research has told us this is something unique to our game as this is one of the only tower defence games where you don’t only place towers, and this is something that our players love, they love being involved with playing, and always having something to do, and this is what we plan to keep on doing in the future.
From the games that i have played for my research, i have seen that there are no real surprises within the tower defence genre, we have made sure our game does not follow this pattern, our game now keeps players on their feet and ready for action as we have added random events to the game, firstly we have added a boss spawn. When the boss enters the game all the other enemies stop spawning so you must fight off the boss and his minions, and when done you will get a hefty reward, this mechanic has been met with a lot of positive feedback as players can now play the game over and over and it wont even be the same and boring, as they have random events that will spawn that will make everything a lot harder.
Evolution of Defence 