Evaluation

Here is an evaluation of how I believe the project went, I am going to consider which parts of the project went well and which parts didn’t, and why, and how I would improve next time.

Project Proposal

I believe that my project proposal was a success this is because I considered a range of events for the development of the game. For example I considered how long each task within the development would take, because of this we wouldn’t set ourselves unreachable milestones with in the short time that we had, I also planned counter measures in case our work wasn’t completed in time, such as doing work in most important to least, because of this if we did end up not finishing on time we would at least have the most important features of the game completed, and I also stated that if any work wasn’t completed they would have to be completed within our own time. I believe that the consideration I took for how long the project would take was good, this is because I prioritized updates and considered a reasonable time frame for the project which was important if we were going to finish on time. I also considered any problems that may arise during the development and considered ways to minimize the risk as well as solve any problems they may cause, such as having lots of saves and having them backed up, this minimized the chances that we’d lose work because of corruption. I believe this was a good idea for me to do in the proposal as because of this during development we had little to no problems with our work. I also reviewed the strengths and weaknesses of the materials I would be using in my work, I believe this was important as it helped me consider what could go wrong with software and consider what I could do if these problems arise.

Because of how I conducted my project proposal I do not believe there are any changes or adjustments I could make to my proposal because of this I believe my proposal was successful, because of this if I were to create another in the future I would create one in the same way as I believe it was effective as it considered a lot of events for the project such as timing and problems.

Research 

I believe that the research that I conducted for the game was good, this is because I looked into a range of sources, such as numerous tower defence games as well as sources that included evolution, I also looked into the game ‘Age of War’ which is a tower defence game that has evolution involved, because of the range of sources I could find what elements that I could incorporated around the theme of growth and evolution as well as how tower defence games work and deconstruct them to find out which features of tower defence games are fun and that way I can try to add these to our game. This research helped me develop my ideas and consider features that I could use in our game to improve it, this research also showed me features that a tower defence always have because of this I knew which features I would have to include in our game to make sure its a tower defence game and to also meet players expectations of a tower defence game. So because of the range of sources that I used for my research and the inspiration that I got from the research I believe the research was successful, because I got inspirations for the game and found out key features of tower defence games and evolution, so because of everything I got from my research I believe it was successful so if I were to do some research again I would conduct it in the same way by looking into a range of games of the type I am trying to recreate and consider why the game is good, while also looking into the theme of the game research into sources that are based around it, this was I can get the most inspiration for the game for its genre and theme, and I don’t believe there is anything I could improve upon next time because I believe my research was in depth.

Idea Generation

For my idea generation I took aspects of my research and considered which parts of the tower defence games elements I liked as well as inspiration from growth and evolution, I used these to consider elements that could be great for our game, such as ideas for the games interface and how the player shall evolve.

To gather my ideas I also created a mind map that I considered the good and bad features of each of the tower defence games I conducted my research into and considered how I could use the features in our game to make it enjoyable for players, i also created a mind map for rewards that the player could by from the shop and I branched out into different areas that the shop could go into, I believe this was an effective way to gather ideas for the game as I could expand upon my ideas. I believe that this way of gathering ideas was a good method as it expanded my ideas and made me consider different ways the shop could expand which I didn’t consider before so because of this I believe this method was a good way of gathering ideas. I believe that I could however have created more mind maps to help me develop other ideas however I did create other ways of gathering ideas, so if I were to gather ideas for another project I would conduct a few more mind maps to help me with my ideas.

I also created sketches to help my idea development when creating my sketches I considered ways that the games I had research into created features and tried making them as similar as I could to my research, I believe this was a good idea as it helped me try to consider the ways that the games that I researched did each method and I tried to mimic them as I knew they were effective ways of doing features such as the shop menu, as I knew if I could create similar interfaces they would be effective and liked by players. Because I created sketches it was very easy to show players the ideas that I was considering and could ask them what they though of content, Because I created a few sketches for each idea I decided to poll the content to players to get their thought on content and find out which ideas they liked more. Because of this method that I used of sketches to gather ideas and create similar features for our game It was very easy for me to poll the content to gather more ideas and to get player feedback I believe this was a good method of gathering ideas as I could directly get players feedback towards content and make any adjustment from their feedback, so because of how I could get player feedback for content to find out if players would like or hate content before its been produced it meant that i could make any changes to the idea before creating it which may have ended up wasting development time which wouldn’t have been good for the game. If I were to create more sketches for another project I would consider creating more sketches than what I did for this project as they were an effective way of gathering ideas as well as getting player feedback on content.

Another method I used to gather ideas as well as feedback was by creating surveys, with these I asked players questions to which I got responses from these I got some ideas into how I could improve the game such as making the screen shake feature more noticeable which would help me improve the game. I believe that this method could have been better for example if I would have structured the questions better and not let players answer lazily I would have gotten more in depth responses which would have been more useful for my games development, however I did find out that players enjoyed the game. They are changes that I would make next time if I did a project like this.

Project Management

I believe our project management was very effective, this is because we considered how long each task would take and created a reasonable gant chart that had a time table to how long we expected each task to take, I believe this was important and effective because it meant we could consider how long our work would take and make sure that everything would be completed on time, I believe that we could have expanded on the gant chart to include more work that we produced as time went on such as changes made from player feedback.

I believe that we distributed work with in our good effectively as because we each were working on our own areas we could combine our work to produce content quicker for the game for example Tyler creating sprites for the enemies,Sam coding the movement of the enemies and me coding the enemies health, because of this areas of the game were developed quickly and effectively, because of this if I were going to work in a group again I would work like this again as I believe it was an effectively way to produce work for the game, I can’t think of anyways I could improve upon this for another project.

I also produced weekly evaluations for the game, with these I considered what was good and bad about the game I also planned what I was going to do the following week before the following week started, I believe this was effective way to gather ideas for changes that should be made to the game, I also think it was a good idea that I knew what I was doing the following week as it meant I could consider Ideas I could create in the game, it also made sure that I knew was I was doing at any point of development as I didn’t have to think about what needed doing and could start working on content immediately, I believe this was an effective way to structure what I would be working on the game as it allowed me to think about what I can do for content before I start working on it and because of the gant chat as well I also knew exactly what I would be doing at any point during the week, which was useful to save time so we could meet the deadline, Because this was successful in helping me reach the deadline if I were to do another project I would plan what I am doing each week before the week starts so I know exactly what I’m doing so I can produce more work as well as think off better ideas while I have the weekend to think about the content.

Use of Materials

Because that we as a team are used to working on game we decided that it would a good idea to continue using game maker as we have experience using it which would mean that we could save development time as we could use transferable coding from previous games into this one as well as spending less times using tutorials as we would already know some coding. I believe this was a good idea for us to do as we saved a lot of time by quickly adding coding that we already knew and because we were used to the language of game maker we didn’t have much new to learn, because of this if I were to create another game I would use game maker again as now I have even more knowledge on game maker and so using it again would be even more useful for our game.

I created some of my working using pen and paper to create sketches and polls, I decided that using pen and paper would be easier to create the ideas that I was thinking off for the sketches, as I am better at creating images on pen and paper than Photoshop; it also presented a much quicker and easier way to poll players as it didn’t require sending links which puts some people off doing polls, also because I had the work on paper I could scan them into the computer, this way I had two copies of the work, this way if anything would happen to either the online file or the one on paper I would still have the other one. I believe this was a good method of creating work as it gave me more ways to back up the files as I could have a copy on paper and the computer, also because the sketches and polls would be easier on paper than a pc as it made gathering players feedback extremely easy, because of this I would strongly consider using this method again if I were to create a similar project, this is because I believe it was a more practical way of getting feedback on a range of topics.

The game

I believe the game was successful, this is because we all achieved everything that we originally planned on creating for the game for the deadline, we also enjoyed the game, and we also we achieved the goal that the players would like the game as my feedback has shown that players has enjoyed the game which is what we hoped to accomplish with the game. I believe the game could have some improvements made to it such as adding more levels to the game, adding more features to the shop and having more verity of enemies, this is something that I would have liked to add to the game and if I could repeat the project I would also spend less time on content that didn’t make the cut as this made the content a waste of development time which could have been spent on the above features to improve the game.

I believe that I produced good work for the game such as the shop and bug fixes over the weeks, I believe this because the players said that they liked the shop as well as other features that I created, I believe it was a good idea to follow tutorials while producing work for the game, this is because the tutorials helped speed up the development of the features while also limiting chances of bugs arising later in development, because of how effective the tutorials were I would use tutorials again if I were to work on another game, as they save development time and work.

I believe it was a good idea for me to constantly ask for player feedback for content for the game as because of feedback I could create updates that I knew players would like before starting because they said they wanted it in the game, because of this there were less chances of me producing work that would be disliked and later removed from the game which wouldn’t have been healthy for the games development as it would have caused me to waste a lot of development time, I believe that I maybe could have gotten more player feedback on some areas of the game such as shop prices in the game, however I still believe the feedback I got for content was very useful for the games development, because of this if I were to do a similar project again I would try and get as much player feedback as I did in this project to make sure that no development time is wasted and to make sure that players would like the game as that was our main end goal for the end of the project, which as my surveys showed players liked the game.

There were some parts of the game that didn’t go so well, for example the inventory system had to be scrapped during development because of errors and problems it caused, however I did learn from the experience of creating the system, if I were to create it again for another project I would make sure I followed a tutorial to make sure that I didn’t waste any development time by later having to remove the system from the game or having to spend a lot of time fixing errors, as when watching tutorials often lowers the chances of problems with content.

End results

I believe that the game was a success because I myself enjoyed the game and so did the players who were testing the game thought the development, I believe the game was successful because of a few reasons, such as the gant chart that we created for the project was very effective in making sure that we kept on track for the deadline, I also asked for player feedback on content often to make sure that the content we were working on was always what players wanted in the game, and lastly I believe it was successful because of what players said in the survey. The content that I liked most about the game was working on the shop this is because there was a range of areas of rewards that I could go into, I also liked the rewards that were produced that the players could buy such as the X3 damage which was very effective when taking out the boss.

There are a few features that I would have liked to expand upon on the game such as adding a turret to the shop that has a chance of shooting a freezing bullet that would cause 1 enemy to freeze for about 3 seconds which I would have created by making the enemy object get replace by one that doesn’t have the moment variables and after 3 seconds would switch back into the original object, chances like these wouldn’t require too much time to develop and I would have liked to add if there we had more development time, However I still am happy with the outcome of the game.

Blog Posts

I believe that the blog was successful this is because of my research and previous experience with posting on blogs helped me in structuring the blog such as posting often and in a professional form, which I believe made the blog successful, I believe the choice of posting on a blog over working in a work book was a good idea as people over the world could view our blog and comment, like or follow our posts; because our blog has gotten likes and follows from people over the world it shows that people liked our posts so much they wanted to keep up to date with them, because of this we knew that what we were producing was liked by people so we knew we were producing updates that players liked.

Our blog was also useful in presenting how our work had developed over time as viewers could scroll down the page and see how the game was progressing over time I believe this was a useful part of our blog as it allowed viewers to see how our game had developed over time and where it was heading. One slight problem we had with our blog is some posts were posted a bit later than they should have, however this wasn’t a huge issue with the blog and so because of this I would use a blog on another project as it was an effective way to show our games progression to the players and was popular with followers.

GameJolt

I believe it was a good idea for us to post our game on the online gaming website GameJolt this is because the website can be seen from people all over the world; this allowed our game to get more views, also because strangers can easily find the game it allowed us to get feedback on the game, and  because the people are strangers they are less likely to lie to make us feel good about the game which makes their opinions more useful than those from friends who could lie about what they think about the game.

Next time I would upload the game earlier as we posted the game a bit later than what we should have to make sure the game had more updates, I believe we should have instead had a disclaimer informing players that it was in very early stages of development and feedback was welcome. Next time I would also post the game on the itch.io gaming website as this would have allowed our game to get more views and so we could have gotten more feedback on the game which may have helped in the game’s development.

Outcomes

I believe that we successfully kept with the theme of evolution and growth that we had set ourselves as the game is hugely based around this theme, the game also maintains most of the features that you would expect to find in a tower defenece game; because our game stuck with these themes as much as we could I believe the game successfully meant this goal that we have set.

Another one of our out comes was for the game to be liked by developers and players a like; considering the results I got from my surveys and play tests I would say that players enjoyed the game.

Changes for Next time

I would try and find a more effective way of transferring code in game maker as we had to manually copy and paste coding, and I believe there will be a better way of doing this, this would have saved us time which we could have used for developing the game.

I would consider if mechanics would suit the game more and also follow more tutorials for content that I’m unsure how to code, this way I can minimize the chances of the game being removed either because they aren’t working correctly or not suiting the game.

Compilation of Weekly Evaluation

Week 1

For the first week i have been doing research into our project genre, and game genre, i have now conducted all of my research and i believe that it is to a good standard and i believe that it will help my idea generation over the next week.

I believe that my research went well as i got a variety of sources and they will be able to develop my ideas, all of them will be useful for my idea generation

I believe that i could have gotten a few more sources such as from T.v and Comics, and these would possibly have provided me with even more ideas

In future Assignments i will use more sources for my research as that will provide me with more information about my topic and my idea generation.

Week 2

Over the second week i have written my proposal to show the tutor to see if my idea is feasible or not, i believe that the idea will be accepted as i have written alot of what i believe we will be doing, also with the proposal i have done a gantt chart to show the work i will be providing and when i will be doing it, also along with this i have dont a bunch of stuff that will be generating my ideas, the things i have been doing are Mind Maps, Moodboards, and Thumbnail Sketches, these have helped develop my ideas alot and they will be useful in the future.

I believe that my proposal went well as it was accepted and i can go on to work on my game.

I believe that my Idea Generation has worked well as i have a list of things that i will be adding to the game that my Idea Generation tasks have provided me with.

I would love to have produced more things that would have developed my ideas and i will try to do so in future assignments

Week 3

Over the Third week i have been creating the game and i have been making rapid prototypes to see if the game will work as planned, then when the game did work we assessed it by having the tutor and players test it and they believed it worked well, so we went forward with the idea, and i started to add more things with greater mechanics, the things i did over the first week were, things such as movement, base collision, Enemy’s, shooting and death.

I believe that the mechanics i added to the game all worked well and that it will be a key part for the game progession later on through out creation.

I do not believe there is anything i would change with what i did during the Third Week, this is because it all worked as planned.

Week 4

Over the Fourth week i created the advanced mechanics within the game, these were things such as different levels, evolution to next level, energy creation, Enemy advanced spawning, Boss random events, Minion spawning with boss, Minion Shooting, a new Chaser Enemy, and the Buy-able Turret and its Upgrade.

I believe that the mechanics i added during the 4th week all worked effectively and i believe that they have helped to make the game replay-able and also it makes each play through unique as every enemy spawns from a brand new location.

I believe that i could have improved the Spawn Mechanic for the Enemies to make sure there is at least one enemy in the room at all times for the player to fight as currently there can be moments of peace where the player has nothing to do, also i believe that i could have added more then one boss event to make the game alot more replay-able, and add a different variety to the game so the player has alot more things they need to learn to be good at the game.

Week 5

Over the 5th week i have been adding things that have been suggested by player feedback, such as changes to the enemies making them spawn less or more often, also i have been adding bug fixes that make the game just that little bit nicer to play.

I believe that this week was productive as it meant that players had more fun playing the game and they knew that what they suggested was actually in the game as they played it and saw they were implemented.

I believe that aswell as doing this i could have tried to add more things to the game aswell as just little bug fixes but i didnt do this and this is something i would do in future to prevent not using valuable time.

Week 6

For this week i have been doing my Evaluation and i have been writing up my Weekly Evaluation into a Compiled version, I believe that my Evaluation worked well as i have reflected upon what i have done and what i should do in the future, and my weekly evaluations show what i have been doing over my time and how it has been spent.

Evaluation

Evaluation

Project Proposal

I believe that my project proposal was a success because of a range of reasons. one reason i took into account how long my tasks would take to be completed this meant i set my self realistic goals,i also prioritized my work, doing vital parts first and then lesser parts last this then meant that if i spent too much time on something it meant that there wasn’t much that would be left out that was key as i would have abandoned them to meet the deadline,if i didn’t complete anything i would then complete it at home, this meant that i would meet the deadline, i believe it was a good idea to consider these things as it meant i had a good time frame for my work.

i also believe that considering problems i would face and their solutions was effective as it meant that when i bumped into a problem i knew how to handle it, it also made sure that i evaded a few problems straight away when i started the tasks, like making multiple saves to prevent loss of work and because of this it meant i could save time later on.

I also considered the pro’s and cons of the software i would be using i believe this was effective, because i could consider any problems that the software may cause and the limitations they have so i knew what to do if problems happened as well as what to avoid.

Because i believe that my project Proposal was effective i do not believe there is anything i would change about it if i did something like this in the future.

Research & Idea Generation

My ideas developed a lot through out my work, as my ideas were changing due to a range of reasons, such as constructive feedback from Q/A, as well as Research changing the game idea and improving on it, also my ideas just generally changed while working on the game and i came up with an idea that would work well with the current thing i was trying to implement.

My ideas changed throughout the project when i bumped into a problem, or when i was told by feedback that i should leave something how it is,so sometimes that meant that i left something in its original form as it was liked more at that stage, or it meant that i would change something form feedback and make it better,

I Gathered research from the film series X-men i believe this part of my research was useful as it went into the theme of evolution and growth, as it talks about how the human species has evolved to adapt and become a more dominant species, this gave me ideas that would be added to the game such as power ups that make you more domenant then your enemies making you stronger then them.

I Gathered research from playing the game Evolve and i believe that it was useful as it directly tapped into the theme of Evolution and Growth, this gave me ideas that i would then go and put forward into the game we were creating, such as the player growing in size as they evolve.

I also gathered research from Feedback from people who played the game, this was one of the most crucial pieces of my research as it was coming straight from the players, which are who the game is targeted at, and that made it more useful then any research i could gather from a book, as it was directly telling me what people wanted to find within the game. all my research helped to develop my ideas and this made them very useful and crucial to my work, and my game wouldn’t have been the same without them.

Also i gathered Feedback from our Game Jolt page, as we did get followers of the game so it must have been liked also we did get a comment on the game saying that the game was good, but the game doesn’t have much views or plays, so i believe that we need to update the page in the future by doing things such as adding a HTML play to the game, and then more people would play it as its easier,also we didn’t put our game on a another free gaming website called itch.io and if we wanted even more feedback we should have gone on there too and these are things that i would do for future projects as they could help produce a lot more feedback that would be useful to us and is key for future work.

Another very crucial  part of research was looking into tower defence games, as it gave me ideas of what mechanics we could have within the game and it was showing a lot of key things we could use from other games to expand upon our game and make it better.

The bit of my research that has inspired me the most i would say was player feedback, as i loved having people tell me exactly what they liked about the game and telling me what they would like to see in the future, and also while seeing them play the game and enjoy it, it made me only want to make the game better and better for them, also when i saw the enjoyment decrease when they found a bug within the game, it only made me want to change the game and get rid of it fast so they could go back to enjoying the game, and this is why i think it inspired me the most, as it made me change the game constantly and add things that could only improve on the game and make it loved by more and more people.

Also from my research into other blogs i have been making sure that our blog has been kept to a good standard and not left a mess of un-categorized work and being left un-posted upon and bare.

I believe that i could have done more research like looking into mechanics that were shared within Tower Defence Games and then i could compare which was the best with the mechanic and implement something like the best one into our game, this is something i will try to do in future assignments, however i did do a little bit of this within my mood boards as i did look at different versions of the things i was working into comparing each game.

Project Management

I believe that our Project management was effective, but it could have been more effective, as we could have done more that would have kept us more on track and make sure that we didn’t spend time on areas that we had spent too much time on compared with others, we used a Gantt chart to show our time spent on certain area’s but this wasn’t always followed as much as it should have been, but i still believe that we achieved our goals well, but i do believe that we could have made a check-list as well with our work, and then we could have compared it with our Gantt chart and it would help us edit the Gantt chart at a later date so we knew what we should change about our time distribution to get the most work out of the time we had.

If i would change anything about the way we managed the project it would be the way we handled our management of time, as we only entrusted our time to be managed by our Gantt chart and instead we should have had more measures in place to help us manage the time more effectively and not fall behind in certain areas.

Also with my weekly evaluations i believe that my time has been also handled well as that has followed my gantt chart but i still didnt have a checklist to compare with my gantt chart to make sure i did everything and spent time wisely but i believe my weekly evaluation has had input on how i have managed my time.

Use of Software and Materials

We decided we were adamant that we wanted to create a game as it would give us the most pride out of making, which would then in turn make us produce more work then if we did something we didn’t put as much love into, we decided that we would use Game Maker to produce the game, as we are experienced in Game Maker as we have used it before in past projects, and i have been using it in my own free time to create games and i have gained a great understanding of coding so i know how i can do things within Game Maker quickly and effectively and have them work perfectly for us ,

We also used Pen and Paper to create parts of our work such as Thumbnail Sketches, we did this because we thought it was a good way to get our ideas down, and it might be safer to do it on paper rather then on computer as on computer they could be lost easier, but if we did them on paper we could then scan them in online and then we had both a digital copy as well as a physical one, and also with having the pen and paper it meant that we could do more with it, as it was all free hand so it could be more detailed then the use of a mouse, which would have been less detailed.

If i would change anything about the way we managed the project it would be the way we handled our management of time, as we only entrusted our time to be managed by our Gantt chart and instead we should have had more measures in place to help us manage the time more effectively and not fall behind in certain areas.

Also with my weekly evaluations i believe that my time has been also handled well as that has followed my gantt chart but i still didnt have a checklist to compare with my gantt chart to make sure i did everything and spent time wisely but i believe my weekly evaluation has had input on how i have managed my time.

The Game

The Game that we created suited the genre Evolution and Growth really well, the game works perfectly without much to any bugs at all, the game is fun for the creators and those who have been trying it after every update and have been giving us constructive feedback.

What Went Well

The game has been constantly kept up to date and has never fallen behind in our work, it has been kept a very key part of our work.

Working as a team worked really well as it meant that we could distribute our works, also it meant that i could spend my time in one area and not have to worry about others area’s such as art, as the art was in better hands, and this meant that i could add more updates to the game more often and make playing it a better experience.

The mechanics that i made worked well within the game and were liked by everyone, and the only things that i had to remove were bugs, and not any mechanic i added.

The mechanics i added worked nice and easily, and if they didn’t work, a solution soon arise that didn’t cause any if not little amount of problems.

The game stuck very close to our research as the mechanics we made were made from our research and this made the game a lot better as it had aspects of other working games, as well as our own ideas unique to our game.

Our mass numbers of saves worked well as it meant we had something to reflect on so we knew how to change the game in the future and it also worked extremely well at protecting the game.

Also with how we were constantly asking players what they thought about the game it meant that we didn’t face problems like having to remove content from the game, also in our project proposal we talked about what problems we could face later and that helped us avoid a lot of the problems we could come across.

What Didn’t Go Well

A few mechanics that i did try to make work never actually ended up into the game, such as a mute button, but i will attempt to fix this in future.

We had problems with Game Maker at times as sometimes it wouldn’t work, and that made a pause in our working, but we got it fixed a little while later by our tutor.

When trying to make the game work online, we did face a problem where it corrupted the Game Maker File, but with the constant saving we had been producing we were only set back 5 minutes worth of code.

Final Thoughts

The elements i love most about our game is the Originality of the idea as its not a game that you will find and think ours is just a clone as the game is completely unique and if you want a game to play that is like this one it will be our game, i also like the evolution within our game, as it is something that changes the game dramatically as each level gets a lot harder and requires you to evolve you tactics while playing the game, as well as actually evolving the character and enemies and i believe that it adds a lot of replay-able aspects to the game, also i love the turret that we added to the game, as it is a permanent upgrade that works well and it is something we had been trying to add to the game for a while so the game is also evolving your surroundings to use for your advantage so i liked that we could do that effectively, and i also love the upgrade to the turret as it is a very helpful piece of code for the game.

The elements i don’t like about our game is that there are not many levels within the game making it a lot shorter then i would actually like it to be and that means that it is way to quick to complete and that means when you’ve played it once there isn’t much more to do, but later on it would get harder and you would have to try hard to complete the game and that means if you die you would play again so the game would be played for longer, also i would love to add more bosses or more boss mechanics as then the game would have more varieties, also i would love to code the shop in a different way as if anything else was added to the game it had to be ran through the shop first and that made everything a bother to add.

I am happy with The game we created as a team over all, i believe that we all helped contribute to the game and i believe we were all vital to the making of the game, and it wouldnt have been the same without one of our members, i believe that it is a game that is great to play and i would absolutely love to play and upgrade the game in the future, because it helped advance my skills in game maker, and in teamwork, and i gained a good experience of what it is like to work in a team and i know that it works well being able to distribute your work out with the team so it isnt all on one member, and i think  that this will be useful information for future topics.

Blog Posts

we have had experience with blog posts as our last assignment required us to work on a blog, so we felt like doing it again wouldn’t be hard and it would be a very nice way of displaying our work, also it meant that we could display our work to the public and help us gain feedback for the game, as we added a link to our game jolt page so this meant that people could easily go from our blog to try out our game.

I believe our development blog worked effectively as it helped us show our progression from what we started with to what we ended with, the only problem we had with the blog was we didn’t update it regularly enough to show everything as time went on but other then that i believe that the blog worked very effectively, as people did view our game through it and they liked the posts we made showing they had an interest in it, and it did display our game over time so i believe it was successful.

Outcomes

I believe that we successfully stuck to the theme we selected and it can be visibly be seen within our game as you can see that the game is set in evolving to survive and the player is growing as time progresses and becoming stronger and having to face tougher stronger opponents, just like how evolution actually works.

Also from my questions and answers i have posted i can tell that the players do like the game as i had hoped to be an outcome.

I believe that the blog has been a success as it documents the game through time and it has been viewed and liked by others.

I believe that i could have done more work, however i did achieve everything i had planned within my project proposal, so what i would have been adding would have been stuff that just made the game more fun for those who have been playing it, and i do believe i will be working on the game within my free time as it is a game i have grown to love through its development and i believe it can only go forward, so i plan to add more to the game.

What i Would Change If We Did It Again, Or For Future Projects

There are a few things i would change in the future, these are things such as before i try to do a piece of code that will take a lot of time, i would research into the mechanic and see if it is doable as then i wouldn’t have been wasting my time on something that wont actually work in the end.

Also i would research into how to get game maker files to work online first, before attempting it first and corrupting the save, as i would much rather avoid this in the future.

Art and Sound Evaluation

Things that went well

I made all of the essential art and a lot of the non-essential art as well as the music and sound effects for the game within the allocated time, there wasn’t any problems with Photoshop or the Pulseboy website. we were able to easy transfer the art and sound into the game using Google Drive which lowered the chance of files getting corrupt and deleted by accident. Primary research was quite easy for us because people like to give their opinions on games which told us what we needed to improve or fix.

Things that didn’t go well

My USB corrupted all my work so a few pieces of art were lost but most of it was backed up on Google Drive anyway so it wasn’t a major setback. At first the pixel art style was hard to create and make work well so this time I spent learning reduced the time spend creating art. Learning how to use Pulseboy was also time consuming and frustrating because the only type of music I could make was boss music which really didn’t fit with anything else.

Problems

There wasn’t any major problems other than being able to create the art and upload it to the blog and write about it without running out of time. The Pulseboy website has quite a few glitches which made me loose my songs a few times.

Solutions

Allow more time for the blog posts and more time for learning how to create pixel art and sounds. To get around the glitches with Pulseboy I just had to click things slower and not try to make it multitask too much.

Rare Random Events

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.

Weekly evaluation (4)

This week hasn’t been a big changing week like previous weeks for the game and mainly has had changes to make game play nicer for players such has fixing bugs.

I made the shop have an animation so when the players hover over the shop it slightly opens and then when they enter it is fully open this was to make it easier for the players to be able to tell that the shop is a shop and so the player will click it and enter, it also makes shop more interesting.

Changed the button to enter the shop as now the shop is animated there are currently a few problems so the button to enter the shop is now 0 and to leave is left click, this is only a temporary change as left click to enter isn’t vital for the shop and I believe changing this later down the line would be better than now so I can change other content that needs fixing first as others may be more important to resolve as they could stop the game from working which is more important than making a slight difference to the shop.

Fixed a problem with the random base healing power up that could cause the player to lose the game when collected when the player already had around 7 hits left and fixed a bug that cause the power up to display the wrong image index as instead of healing the base it appeared like the base was taking damage. (This was after the damage bug was fixed.)

Fixed an issue where when the boss on the 3rd level was defeated it didn’t respawn the enemies that are in the 3rd level as it made the 3rd level unplayable.

Fixed an issue with strong bullets so when the enemies were attacked by multiple bullets at the same time their health would fall below 0 so the player wouldn’t be able to defeat them.

Next week

Next week I plan on doing QA testing and getting players to test the game and suggest any improvements then afterwards, I plan on adding any improvements suggested by players and fix any bugs that may become apparent, this is because we have done everything that we planned on adding up to now so the week will be to minor improvements as all the crucial parts of the game have already ready been developed and so I can just work on minor things to improve the game such as adding more items to the shop, fixing any bugs and adding an effect if the player collides with an enemy so they player can’t shoot for a few seconds; I also intend on fixing the issue with the shops animation and entry key as I shouldn’t have any bigger more important changes to make next week.

Weekly evaluation (3)

The work produced this week worked well as we all focused on our own areas and then added to each others work for example Tyler created the shop interface, while I added the interface and moved the items around and made some changes Sam created the displayed text for each time, because of this we could quickly improve areas of the game and move on to other content.

Shop display

The shop display was a huge improvement from what we had before as it made the shop appear more professional as shops in games don’t just have items in a row at the bottom of the screen and nothing else. Now each item explains what they do, and are larger and so easier to see what the item is and are presented in a better way. This was a improvement to the old layout as there wasn’t any space for text to explain what the item does and also most of the screen was very bare which players disliked, where as now the shops interface takes up most of the screen giving it a more shop like appearance which from player feedback is an improvement from before.

Adding audio

Adding audio to the game was a huge improvement to the game as it gave the game more of an atmosphere and made it more interesting to play so it was a good idea to add audio to the game, and from playing tower defence games for my research it was vital to make the game more enjoyable and to keep players playing for longer..

Fixing bugs

Like every week bugs are fixed to make sure the game work as expected and to make sure the game can be played, this week a larger bug was fixed to prevent the game having issues and going from full screen to windowed; this made issues with the rooms size so the game didn’t display the entire room which was a problem, to fix this I made sure the game was no longer in full screen, this didn’t create any problems and fixed bugs it was causing; I believe fixing the game like this was a good idea as it will prevent any other problems from occurring and it also was a very quick fix to make to the game; which allowed me to quickly fix the problem and then move onto other areas of the game to keep expanding instead of constantly fixing any bugs.

Next Week

Because the work we intended to do has been completed next week will mainly be forced around patching any bugs and play tests to get any suggests from players to improve the game; this way we can make sure content that is being developed is what players want to see in the game and make sure the game can successfully run without any problems.

Weekly evaluation (2)

I believe this week went well as I produced good work and even though not all the work was kept in the game I still learned from it and they helped improve the game.

Item gathering & Inventory

This was intended to be a feature so when the play either collected or bought a power up the power up would be store in the players inventory, however after player feedback and QA test we found that players seemed to forget about their inventory and instead of using their power ups instead collected mass amounts and then used their inventory after they had the max amount of power ups, because of this I decided to remove the inventory, the item gathering also had to be changed a little to make sure the players instantly used any power up they had collected, I kept the old files in case after players tried the new system they disliked it or preferred the old system which I believe this was a good idea as it would have saved me time if I had to add it back into the game. I believe these were good changes to make to the game as it made the power ups more useful and didn’t break any fundamentals of the game, and a inventory isn’t required for a tower defence game as my research has shown so this wouldn’t become a problem. Also after play tests players said it was an improvement from before, so even though players disliked the inventory system it was helpful in the development of the game as it was replaced by a better system.

Shop updates

This week I made a few adjustments to the shop making it more of what would be expected in a game, So i relocated the objects for the items in the shop to make them appear neater and how players would expect to find them, this was a simple task to do and made a huge improvement according to my player feedback. I also changed the sprites for the objects in the room so that they had sprites that made sense to what the player was buying this was a huge improvement from the place holder sprites we were using before as during play tests players we confused to what each item was. I also added 2 new upgrades from player suggestions so the player can buy two ways of healing the base either partly or fully which although made the game easier it also made it more enjoyable as our QA tests showed.

This week I also fixed some bugs to improve the game such as removing flickering sprites and fixing some items in the shop costing more energy than they should have.

For next week

I’m going to add a shops display window, this way it will be  easier for the players to tell that they are in the shop; it will also fill up a large amount of the screen and make the shop more shop like while also giving it a better appearance as players said the screen seemed abit empty.

An very important part of my research showed that it is important for a game to have sound as it makes the game more interesting to play, and because audio is so commonly used players will be expecting audio when they play our game, because of this when audio has been created I’m going to add it into the game as it will be a huge improvement.

I’m also going to fix some problems with the game being windowed. When the player buys items in the shop and gets a windowed message it causes the game to no longer be in full screen and forces windowed mode and because of this some of the screen is missing; if the player also pauses the game that causes the same issue; to resolve this I could either try fixing the reasons to why the game is going into windowed such as replacing the windowed message with drawn text and try fixing the pausing issue. Or I could make the game always in windowed mode as when the game is played on a web browser it won’t become a problem, this may be the easiest way to fixing the problem which will give me time to work on other content, it would also be an improvement from full screen so I will most likely use this method.

Week evaluation (1) (updated)

I feel the first week on working on the game was successful as lots of content was produced for the game earlier than expected. I believe these were good additions to the game and work well this is because they have no problems and from my research are mechanics that feature well in tower defence games; most also had positive player feed back. I believe the content developed will have to go though some more play tests to see if player feed back suggests any changes some be implemented such as changing the health of the enemies; most changes shouldn’t become a problem later down the line as most would require a simple value change, I believe its a good idea for us to develop content that can be edited upon later if suggested by play testers to improve the game. I also finished weeks work earlier than anticipated this gave me enough time to start working on content such as the pause menu early.

Pause menu

The pause menu worked well with the method I used of deactivation from finding it in game makers help page and it work how it was originally intended to however to improve upon it next time i would plan on adding more features to the menu other than simply pausing the game, for example I get the chance I will add features such as help and quit to the menu; this way if new players don’t understand how to play the game they can find out by simply pausing the game this would make the pausing a much more effective and useful feature. From my research pause menus generally have more features than just resume so adding features would be welcomed as this would make the game more like a tower defence and so would be a good improvement.

Enemy Health

Adding health to the enemies worked well for our game as the game was to easy when the player could simply shoot one bullet and then change target, by adding more health it made the game more interesting. This feature could be improved by having enemies with a range of health as from my research I found that tower defence games always have enemies with a range he health

The inventory system

The inventory system was scrapped early in development. This is because of a range of reasons such as the game had problems drawing the inventory, players often forgot they had an inventory and so didn’t use it too much. We also felt an inventory doesn’t really suit our game and so because of that and the other reasons we removed them. If we were going to create another inventory system I would change the maximum amount of items the player could carry to a much lower number, this would force players into using them more often rather than collecting large amounts and not using them, I would also create a message so once the player had gotten the max carry limit the game would give them a message to remind them that they have the inventory; this would make it harder for the player to forget about it.

Item pick up

Item pickup had a range of changes made during progression such as from being store into the players inventory after they had been collected to once the inventory was removed changed so once each power up was collected they instantly worked instead, this change was different to the original plan for the item pick up however was an improvement from the first. If i were going to recreate this feature for another game I would use the same methods as I didn’t experience any problems with the 1st and 2nd versions of the item pick up and I can’t think of anyways to improve them either.

Score

The score system for the game works very well as it works exactly as planned and has no errors or problems, the initial 5 energy per energy has been chanced to 1 as this makes working out values easier for both the players and developers when it comes to creating the shop and buying items. Because of the changes that have already been made I don’t see any reason to why any changes would be needed .

Saving

The room saving was a successful part of the game and almost worked as expected however we didn’t consider the storage space that the save file would use, this caused problems when the game was played on a computer that was reaching its storage limit, because of this we will have to inform the player the required amount of space needed to play the game so the player will know to make space if any is needed. Adjustments may be needed to the scripts after the menus are created.

If I were to make any changes next time I would follow an online tutorial to make a inventory system that works better as the one I used had a range of problems and so it was removed. I would also look into having a save button so the player can freely save the game whenever they like rather than when the player enters the room.