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.
Category: Development
Complex Thumbnail Sketch
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
Technical problems
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.
Random Event spawn -Updated
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.
Creating a second Level
Our game has a second level which has different enemies to the first level, from our research we have seen that in tower defence games the enemies change as you get stronger, with our game being set to be about evolution and growth, we have made this change more visually direct, as now with us having a second level, the player has evolved into a new species, but also so has the enemy, evolution within the tower defence genre is not seen all that often and it makes our game very unique, also feedback from our second level has been very positive as people think it makes the game a lot less boring and repetitive as you can directly see the game changes through out the levels.
Full Screen mode.
From our recent changes to our game, our game now supports Fullscreen mode with no problems and it will not go in and out of the full screen mode, this has come with a lot of positive feedback as it has made the game more playable as people use to miss and minimize the game, so now that that cant happen we have had a lot of positive feedback.
also not many tower defence games support Fullscreen Gameplay which makes our game a unique one within the tower defence genre.
Pause Menu
From my research i have seen that usually within tower defence games the pause button really just stops everything from moving while the player can still see everything that is going on, in our game we initially used a black screen that said “paused” but we decided that this should be changed, so i expanded upon my peer Joseph’s, work of a pause menu, and i change it to a full working pause menu, even with options such as resume, controls, and back. i believe that this is better then the pauses in the other tower defence games i believe this because it gives the player more control over the game, rather then them just stopping things from moving, they can do things such as view the controls or quit the game.
here is a video of the changes made.
Death = Game Over
from my research I have seen that within tower defence games they almost always start from the beginning when you loose, at first our game didn’t follow this mechanic, but now i have changed our game to present the player with a death screen (image shown below created by my peer Tyler) for when they die, this screen then lets the player go back to the main menu, feedback has told me that this has made the game more professional and that it should stay in the game as it makes the game look more developed then it just starting the same level again.
Shop Chest Animation and layout
I fixed the issue with the shop chest, this resolved the issue that the chest would display the wrong animation when the player was in the shop and in the level; because this was fixed I also changed the keys to enter and leave the shop; they are now before left click to enter and leave, this is because after playing tower defence games such as bloons they don’t use the keyboard, because of this I decided both entering and leaving would have to be a mouse click; left mouse click is used a lot in gaming to interact with things so I decided to change the key to left click as players will most likely expect it to be left click to enter the shop, this makes more sense then having num lock 0.
We also updated the shops interface, this was to make the shops a lot neater like the ones I found in my research so because of this I took inspiration from the games that I research into such as bloons so because of this the items are now presented better and when the player hovers over the items the game informs the player its effects, players said that this was a huge improvement to the old shop as it looked more professional and it also made the items more useful because they stated the cost and the effects which before the player had to remember what each item did or make assumptions from the images. I believe this was a big improvement to the game as it had a much better appearance and looked like the shop you would find in a tower defence game as it was based around the ones that I researched into.
Player Damage
I added a feature into the game that was suggested by a player; so that once the player had hit and object or an enemies bullet they would have a debuff effect, I also considered adding this into the game when I first research into how games deal with the player colliding with the enemy. I decided to make a few changes to the player once they had taken damage inspired from the game Mario.
First the players sprite will be translucent with each stage of the gif getting more and more transparent this is so the player can easily see that they are still damaged, this is also a feature that is commonly used in games such as Mario and the feature works well in that game so it should work well in ours, also because of how popular games like Mario are; even if the player doesn’t use the tutorial they can quickly understand what’s happening to their character.
The players speed is also slightly reduced this is one of the debuff mechanics this is to penalize players for touching the enemies or blocking the base from a bullet, this is also a way that the player will be able to tell that they have touched an enemy and that, that leads to consequences.
Another debuff that I added is that the player can’t shoot for 2 seconds after they hit an enemy/bullet, this is big problem for the player as they will need to kill the enemies before they reach the base, because of this it will encourage the player to keep their distance from enemies.
These features will need a play test to see if players feel that the debuffs are to harsh and need any nerfs such as the players speed is too slow, or the time the effect is on for is too long and changes will be made depending on results of the feedback given.
After play tests players said that they liked the update however felt that the time of the debuff was too long, because of this the time will be lowered to 3/4 of the original value (2-1.5 seconds.) after this was tested again players felt that the time was long enough and so no more changes will be needed
Here is a video to show the players damage effect in game.
Evolution of Defence 