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.

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

Screen Shake

During one of our play test sessions we noticed from watching players play the game that they didn’t notice when the base was taking damage, because of this I thought it might be a good idea to create some easy visual ways of knowing that the base has taken damage instead of simply noticing when an enemy had reached the base, one of the methods we used to stop this from being a problem was to make the screen shake a little after it takes some damage; this was very popular with player feed back.

My research also showed that tower defence games such as age of war show visual effects such as the base’s health, because of this our screen shaking won’t be out of place; too improve on this and make it closer to what my research found we could add a bar or some images so the player can visually see the difference in the base’s health so they know when they’re close to death as this would work well in the game as suggested by my research.

To find out how to do this I watched an online tutorial and made any changes so the scripts would work in our game such as changing the events so when the enemy hits the base that’s the event that creates the shake. Below is the shake feature I added into the game and the online tutorial I followed to create the effect.

screen shake Ingame working screen shake

Our game so Far

 

Our game at its current state, is very basic, but is beginning to look like a game, the basic plot for the game is that enemies spawn outside the area you can see and attempt to get to the lilly pad while the player must stop them, also when the player kills a enemy they get energy, which they can then spend in a shop to upgrade their base.

First player sprite creation

The first creature will be a tadpole, I took inspiration from this picture: