Healing Power up

From my research i have seen that usually within tower defense games you cannot heal the base once it has taken damage, this is not something we are going for, we have added to both the shop and to a random generator, a healing option, so we have added a power up that can be collected on rare occasions that heals the base, we have again done this as something that sets us apart from other games, and it is something that makes the game more complete able rather then other tower defense games, it is nice as it means you can play for longer too which makes it more fun.

First when making this we faced many problems where the base would rather then being healed it would be hurt instead, we then fixed this, then we faced a problem where it did heal the base but it made sure afterwards you took a loss of 1 hp it killed you we then fixed this, then we faced a problem where you gained the health but the base showed a loss of health when collected then we fixed this also, then we made sure that if you touched it when it wasn’t needed it wouldn’t collect, this worked at times then broke, later the whole thing broke so we abandoned it,

Finally i decided that i would approach it again from the beginning, and i managed to make it work perfectly, with only a few of the old features missing, this to make it the best it could be without the bug.

Turret

From my research I’ve seen that a big part of the tower defense series is that turrets and towers are a key part of the game, and to add some extra little power to the game so the player can gather energy without having to save the base and miss energy, we have now made a buy able turret, the turret can shoot 1 enemy that is close to the base to kill it, this becomes very useful in a lot of situations so it is something that we have gotten great feedback from so it is most likely going to be something we build upon later on.

While creating the turret i had a great struggle making it,at first i went with the idea of creating a better base that can take more damage while also providing a turret, later on i abandoned this idea, and instead i would just make a turret, but i didn’t change the object, so it was a new base, which meant that the coding of a lot of things needed changing, so really i chose the least most effective way of doing it, later on i eventually got it working but then, with some other changes we wanted to make it became impossible for this to work, so i originally abandoned the idea as i thought it would take too long and it would lessen then time i can spend on other things.

Later i came back to it and decided to go back to before i made any of the turret or its attribute, so i created a brand new object and it worked a lot better, although then after this when the shop was opened and closed it either spawned or de-spawned the turret, so i spend time to fix this and eventually i managed.

I also wrote a code that meant that the turret should stay after evolving into a new level, but this would not work no matter what i tried, so rather then spending time trying to fix this i decided upon making it 3 times cheaper so people can just buy it during every level, and its not too much of a bother, now i am done with the turret for the time being.

Play Tests

Every week we at least do one play test, we do one on a Thursday and any more before if we have added something large into the game; we do this to make sure that content is working and so players are enjoying the game.

I believe it has been a good idea for us to do at least 1 weekly play tests as over the weeks we have been doing them we have updated the game in a range of ways from how we found people were playing the game and suggestions we were given; which has changed a range of areas of the game which is what we wanted them to do.

How the play tests work:

We ask people if they would like to play the game and record anything they might do/not do or say, this can be a range of things for example if the player starts shooting power ups instead of collecting them, if any bugs are found during the tests, or if the player likes or dislikes a part of the game.

These images shows bugs that players found while playing the game, if it wasn’t for the play tests we might not have found the bugs as easily and created a way to remove it.

These images show play tests at different stages of development  from these we got a range of feedback such as mechanics for the game such as players didn’t like that when they tried to move around their base they kept bashing into the base its self, the players thought they would be able to travel though the base.

We also got feedback to how a player suggested that the shop should look like so we created a few ideas and got the players to pick which layout they preferred and use that for our game.

One suggestion we got from a few players which the development team didn’t consider was making the sprites larger which after we tried made a huge improvement to the interface and other plays also liked the new sizes, because of this we kept the players idea in the game as it wasn’t a huge change to make to the game and so didn’t go against any of the games fundamentals.

Another player suggested that if the player is hit by an enemy or a bullet they should have some sort of damage effect to make a penalty and to stop players from sitting on top of enemies, because of this I plan on adding this feature so the player’s speed will be lowered, their sprite will be translucent with a gif so they get more and more transparent the reasons why I’m doing two features is so the player can easily see they are damaged instead of not knowing what’s happening, and I will also restrict the player from shooting to make the game slightly harder for the player, once this has been produced I plan on asking players what they think of the new feature and depending on the majority make changes depending on results.

 

  

Power ups

From my research i saw that no tower defense game i played or looked into actually had power ups that boosted the players strength or speed, even for a limited time, we decided that this would be a unique thing to our game, this would be perfect as its something that makes our game unique to just us, so people will see it and it will set our game out from the crowd, we added this as well to see if it would make the game a little bit easier and it did, and feedback has told us that it is a great thing in the game and that we should keep it and expand more to it.

Evolution

From my research i have seen that within most tower defense games you get unlocks that mean you can defend the tower in different ways using different or stronger up gradable turret, our game will be following this but rather then you upgrading turrets you will be upgrading your self by evolving into a stronger species which means you can do better things and fight/move better and faster, as from the games i have played such as plants vs zombies and bloons i have seen that upgrading towers is a big part of the tower defense genre.

Q/A Testing

One key part from our game is feedback, as we are trying to create a game that is loved by others and with this in mind we have now gotten the game to a stage where it able to be played in a working form, so with this stage ready we are now ready to have others play our game and give us feedback that we will add to the game to make the game better, so we have had alot of people testing our game, here are some images of us getting feedback for our work so we know how to change the game, also we have them pointing our errors within our game that we need to make changes to such as game errors as with having others play the game we can have them find bugs that we didn’t see, and this is important for our game.

Health

from my research i have seen that tower defense games usually have only health on the base but not on the towers,at this moment in time we do not have any health on the player, but later on we plan on adding a health bar to the player so he can be killed and takes a while to respawn.

usually on tower defense games when you die you go back to the beginning of the game rather then of the wave, our game will also follow this rule of death as it is a key part of the tower defense game and it will be needed if we wanting to make the game that is repetitive, and fun to play.

Shooting

One thing that i found in my research was that the tower defense games usually you place towers which then shoot the enemies so all the player actually does is place towers, but that isn’t what we are going for with our game, in our game i have made sure that the player is does the shooting and you are a moving object, so the player does a lot more then they actually do in normal tower defense games, this is so the player has more fun while playing, as they are more engaged.

Rooms

within game maker it uses rooms and so far i have 1 room which is just the first level, but what i am planning on doing is putting about 8 levels into the game.

these rooms include

• Menu
• Level 1
• Level 2
• Level 3
• Help
• Tutorial
• Level Select
• Game Over

from my research i have seen  that tower defense games usually have 1 level with just increasing waves and this isn’t what we are doing for our game,for ours we will be having different levels with more enemies as it means we can do more to the game and it can become better, but all the tower defense games usually have a menu and a help button, but usually don’t have a level select option, ours will be a option that we have within the game once its complete so when players have completed the game and have found the best level that they preferred they can go back to that level.

Base

One thing i found out that was a key part of the game genre of tower defense was that all the games have something you are defending, as it is what makes the game and the title of the genre, its usually a tower,in our game we are making a tower that is in the middle of the screen and enemies spawn from all sides and try to get to the middle without being killed, if the enemies get to the middle it will hurt the base and with this after so many attacks the base will die and the game will restart, i am also trying to make sure that the base can be upgraded upon, as my research shows this is used in a large variety of tower defense games.