Enemies

From playing other tower defense games i know that one of the key parts of the games are the enemies, as the enemies are what you are defending the tower against,i have created the enemies in a easy way where they are just walking in towards the middle and they can be attacked by the player.

Movement

I have created the movement to the game in a nice easy way where it can be edited when ever it needs to be, as the game will most likely have powerups in the future, and with these powerups it will most likely increase the movement speed of the player.

Making the spawning random.

Our game was far too simplex when the enemies just spawned in the room all in the same place and in the same order and this wasn’t liked as it made the game boring very fast, so we decided we would change this very quickly, as its a thing that makes the game unique so we know our game is its own game, we have implemented this function to many parts of the game now, as a lot of our power ups randomly spawn now just like the enemies, also we have implemented bosses to the game that also have this function, in image form these are the things that are involved.  

Full screen – windowed

When the game is in windowed mode the game has had some bugs such as when the game displays a windowed message the game goes from full screen to windowed this has been problematic as after the game goes into windowed the player can no longer see everything in the room anymore for example the energy counter should say “Energy:” however after the player has either paused the game or had a message appear they can only read “gy:” Which is a problem because of this I stopped the game from being in full screen which caused the problems to no longer be an issue, I decided to do this because full screen wasn’t needed for our game and it wouldn’t make much difference without it; and from my research I also found that not all tower defences are in full screen and games such as plants vs zombies have the option to go into windowed, and when they are played from an online client they are in windowed rather than full screen so the change from full screen to windowed shouldn’t become a problem with players and will remove bugs.

Adding Audio

My research showed that tower defences generally have sound, this is an important part of the game as it makes the game more interesting and less dull than a game without sound, because of this it was crucial to add audio to our game, so after some audio was created we added audio to a range of events to make the game more interesting. The audio is mainly 8 bit and we believe the audio suits what makes them play such as the power up sound track, this is because old classic games had sounds like these and they were very effective and iconic to what made them play, we also chose 8 bit as it suited the art pixel style we are using for our game.

Shop display

I have improved the shops appearance more so it looks more like a shop, this is an improvement from before as the sprites were small, because of this most of the screen was bare, which didn’t make the shop look like it was a shop, this would also make the game appear more professional, to change this I added a background that was created for the shop and placed the power ups into the empty slots in the interface. Next I removed the windowed messages that were displayed after the player had gotten an item, this is for a few reasons. One, it wasn’t really required as the player could easily see that they had gotten an item. Two, it caused a problem with the game being in full screen as it caused the game to become windowed which cut some of the screen off so the player could no longer read “Energy:” and could only see “gy:” Three, The message didn’t look professional, from my research shops didn’t inform the player when they had bought an item, so it wasn’t needed in the first place as it wasn’t required for a tower defence. Below is a video of the new shop that also shows information on each power up.

Play testing

Through out development of the game we asked people to play and give feedback on what needs fixing and what could be improved. Here are some pictures: 

Implementing The Audio

Originally nothing within our game had sound, but now almost everything that happens in the game causes a sound as this keeps the player entertained and engages with them more, in all making a more successful game, from my research of games such as plants versus zombies,where again there is sound for everything you do and it really keeps the player entertained and I like this aspect of the game, and I knew I needed it in the game as it makes sure you can play it for so long and this is what is needed.

Implementing the audio was extremely easy as i had a team mate who was making the Audio files and then adding them to our Google drive, then I was just downloading them and loading them into game maker, and making them play under certain conditions, it really went off without a scratch, the only thing I would change about the audio that is more fitting to the game genre.

Game Discussion

today while making the game, we had some of our target audience, in while we make changes to the game, and had them suggesting feedback while we were going along, and this made us make all of our new content catered to our audiences needs.

Evolution of the enemy Spawning.

While researching into the genre and seeing all of the games of the genre I played Plants v.s Zombies, and I noticed that the enemies all spawned in different positions and it meant if you didn’t succeed and get to the next level, you didn’t have it become boring as you knew what to expect through out the whole wave, and this is something our game desperately needed.

Firstly while creating the core aspects of the game, the enemies were originally just placed distantly outside the room, this Very quickly became a problem as the game got stupidly repetitive, and this then made it boring so this meant it had to be changed, previously it looked like this.

Where as now if you enter the room there is nothing at all as all the enemies spawn in all the area’s of the room to make the game different every time, which has made the game both less repetitive and less boring.