2.9 – The End!

The game’s wrapped up, all that is left to do is the paperwork accompanying it. It’s been an experience. We’ve had ups and downs within the group – sadly Max had to leave University due to family issues, but we’re really enjoying this week and just taking some time out to study for our other classes, we feel like we’ve come to the end of our development process for this year – and it’s been a blast.

2.8

Rolling out another version of the game today with different balances for tester’s consideration. Not really much to say this week, just tried to keep the balance on a steady upwards scale, with larger jumps when the player gains more currency.

Again, feel like I’m heading towards the completion of the game and the QA testing is a great experience to get some real-life feedback on our work.

2.7

With the survey sent out, answers are coming in and they’re pointing towards the early scaling being pretty accurate, but becoming increasingly absurd and difficult towards the end.

They also think the tower progression is simple, but effective. It’s got a natural progression, without the useless and pointless towers no one would build, people on average are using every tower at least once.

The art style went down well, too.

Incredibly happy with the feedback so far from both Dr John and the QA testers. 

Week 2.6

The game’s pretty much ready to be tested right now. We’re just sorting out our surveys for QA and what information we actually want back from it. I feel like we’re making real progress, and sometimes it’s better to get another few sets of eyes on it!

• What do they think of the art-style?
• What do they think of the tower upgrades and progression?
• What do they think of the difficulty scaling?

They’re the most important factors in a tower-defense, in my opinion.

If we can get an array of answers to these questions, the answers will lead me to the balancing issues, and they can also give us insight into the upgrade paths and progression.

Week 2.4

Missed out on last week’s blog due to a lack of anything fresh to talk about, but we’ve sorted out our communication. We’ve got two different facebook pages, a private group for plans and a public one for updating about the game.

We’ve also got a twitter feed to get our updates out there. At the moment, I’m mostly just waiting around for my group to finish on their smaller projects, like the sound and animations.

Nick’s working on a sandbox for me to balance the game out in, so I can adjust the numbers on the fly. It’s gonna speed up the balancing process a huge amount. 

Week 2.2 – Standstill

This week’s been really poor, and it’s my fault. I left last week saying I’d work on certain things, and just didn’t. Coming back in this week felt pretty awful – Everyone in the group had done what I’d asked them to do, but I hadn’t done what I asked myself to do.

I really need to work on my time management and prioritising Uni work over my personal life, and hopefully writing things down here will help me keep myself in check. 

I’ve gotta get concepts for a background for the game and easily interchangeable sprites for the monster waves and bosses. 

Nick is being really helpful with the coding side of things and we’ve got a great early prototype to throw things into, to see if they stick!

Week 2.1 – Same Game, Different Semester

This week we’ve really just gotten back on our feet after a longer-than-expected Christmas break, we’ve thrown down our aims for this semester. To get from our current concept to a fully fledged, working game.

We’ve ranked our concepts in order of importance – with everyone agreeing the mechanics are the most important, but having art at a lower importance due to no one really being exceptional at it.

Things are looking good!

Post-Presentation Blog

I feel that our talk went well, but not as well as it could have. 

Firstly and most importantly, Douglas was absent due to illness – this was unavoidable and a really damaging factor.

Another is, we had our presentation and prototype available on Nicholas’ webserver, which the glorious University decided to block access to, without warning.

So we got up with pretty much nothing, and spoke about our game design and future prospects. I felt that we got our point across really well, I spoke in-place of Douglas – without whom I wish to add, our talk would have been weaker and had less content (specifically: the art and balance discussions we had together). 

John seemed happy about the way we were proceeding, but again, the fact Nick’s webserver was blocked was incredibly detrimental to our presentation. We made decent time, even allowing for a couple of questions from our peers.

All I can hope is that the rest of the class, and John thought it went as well as I do – I’m very proud of how far my group has come in the last few months (before this class, we’d barely said hello to each other, now we’re creating something that could potentially be on sale a year from now together).

 

Here’s hoping next semester is just as good as this one has been!

Week 8!

We decided to start working on our pitch/end of semester presentation this week, outlining what we’d like to say and do. We’ve come to the realisation that a prototype is pretty much out of reach (due to the time constraints we’ve left ourselves with between now and the presentation, plus other course’s deadlines coinciding). The plan we’ve got currently is that I introduce us as Team Bane, each of the members, and explain why we’ve chosen a tower defence (can be unique, has a history of being successful) and why we can do it uniquely in a sea of trash (make-your-own-maze structure of gameplay). It’ll then hand-off to Douglas who talks about the theme and art style, leading to Max talking about the User Interface, Frazer talking about the music and sounds in the game, and ending with Nick showing off the main menu and explaining the plan for semester 2 and why we chose HTML5 as our platform. 

We think this is a solid approach and are confident in our chances of engaging both the class and John with our talk.

This talk is the last thing we have to deal with (other than the blog, clearly) in this semester of our Project Design, so we’re all looking forward to the Christmas break afterwards!

Week 6!

(Edit: Missed last week’s blog due to nothing new to write about, just working on more concepts/throwing ideas around about balance)

This week, I tried to get the group together in brainstorming about balance. This is going to be the biggest hurdle in the creation of our game (Extraterrestrial Outbreak is the name we’re running with just now).

Ideally, we want the game to have enough choices to create a unique experience for the player. We want people to have a different choice in mazing every game, but also have a different choice in tower upgrades. You can see our tower upgrade system at http://www.teambanegames.weebly.com 

We also talked about how the towers are upgradable. We had to decide which attribute to upgrade with each level. The amount of time we spent on this was incredible. We had to decide between damage, speed, range, area of effect, single target or multi target, one bullet or two. There were so many variables that we decided to have three different types of upgrade. They all stem from the original tower (average damage/speed/range)  and have three different upgrade paths. You can upgrade it to improve all three attributes together, or focus it on increasing the range only (large upgrade) or lower the range and give the damage an area of effect with it’s damage. You can then increase range or damage once more with each upgrade.

We’re pretty set on this idea, so hopefully it’ll be awesome!