When i was creating the code that gets the minions to fire bullets towards the base, i had a glitch that would make all of the minions fire out of the one that came into the game first, rather then them all firing from themselves,to find a solution i went onto the game maker forums, and very quickly i was given a very helpful reply, that instantly told me what i had done wrong, and how to change it, and i saw what i had done wrong and i worked out what i should have done instead, and i was happy that the reply given to me was quick and effective at telling me what to change.
Category: Gamemaker
Use of Video Tutorials.
When i got up to a piece of code that i didn’t know how to do, i used video tutorials, for example when i was creating the code for spawning enemies randomly i used a tutorial, the tutorial helped me massively as it meant i understood what was needed of me to make the code work, but the code didn’t actually tell me what i needed, but due to me having experience within game maker it meant that i could cross my knowledge over, and have the code work for my uses.
here is the video that i used for the code in my work.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Evolution of Defence 