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. 
Category: Gamemaker
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.
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. 
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 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.
Basic shop
Because the main feature of our game is to collect energy and evolve I created a basic shop that would be the means of doing this.
To create the shop as we believe that this would be the easiest way for players to understand how the evolution works using a point system (energy) as most players will be used to buying items in tower defence (Such as bloons tower defense from my research shows.) to improve and expand their characters strength so to keep with the genre conventions we also decided to have a shop to evolve using the energy that is collected after defeating enemies.
To create the basic shop I used a place holder sprite to set onto an object as a way of testing the shop. The shop works by checking if the player had collected enough energy for any chosen item such as a temporarily power up such as more than 19 energy to buy the power up, if the player had enough energy the game would remove 20 energy and inform the player that they had gotten the item, after this the players object is swapped for the respective powered up version of the player with its events. If the player didn’t have enough energy the player would get a message informing them that they needed 20 energy to buy the item.
This method had its uses however it also created some problems that would be needed to be fixed with the complete shop.
When the messages appeared informing the player that they either had enough or to little energy for the item the game would go into windowed mode and not show the entire room, this became a problem because some parts of the interface became missing such as the energy counter at the top left of the screen you could only read gy:X To fix this we’re going to have to remove the windowed messages as they were causing the problem, these could be replaced by draw events to have text appear on the screen for a few seconds and then remove themselves, we believe its a good idea to keep some form of text as text is a huge part of shops in games and so players expect to see some, and so players understand why they can’t get an item and it also makes QA for the shop easier as we can tell if there’s a problem with the shop or just if we don’t have enough money and just don’t realize it.
Another change that would be needed with the shop is having the objects sprites inform the player both what the item is and how much they cost before the player interacts with them, this is because from my research into games such as age of war and other tower defence games inform the player what item they are buying and for how much it costs before they buy the item so because of this the up to date shop will also have these feature.
The shop will also open its own interface and pause the game this is because there will be too much information for the player to read while the base is being attacked so like plants verses zombies the player will be able to pause the game while they read what they want to do next this is to prevent both the base from being damaged while they are reading and too prevent the player from skim reading the information and not taking anything in and later buying/not buying because they misread the information. This was decided after I created some thumbnail sketches and showed players two ideas, the objects always being in game at the bottom of the screen or in a new interface and players preferred in a new interface this is because that way there would be room for text to inform the players what each item does.
Here is a video showing the basic shop that I have created
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.
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.
Evolution of Defence 