Week 7 & 8: Continuation on Space Shooter
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The seventh week mainly went into fleshing out the core components of our new shooter. The paper prototype we worked on featured three lanes, each with a tree at the player’s end. In these lanes, the game master, representing the AI, places enemy cards which the player will be forced to react to and defend against. The player then places his or her cards in the lane they want to defend. Both player and enemy cards have different attack and health stats and sometimes a special ability. We had one enemy card which could jump over a row of player card to deal damage to card behind it and one that would simply go right past all player cards and attack the tree directly, but take damage from all player cards in the row while doing so. I won’t go into detail on all the specific abilities, but we we’re satisfied with the dynamic of the game at this point. What the game essentially turned into was a tower defense/top-down shooter.
We kept the ability to create different effects by combining certain elements. We put this feature into the plant selection (our ”towers”). Each of the placeable plants would be created by mixing two different seeds, everyone with a unique purpose. This was originally our default projectile but during week eight, after the pitch help session, we desided on instead making it a simple lightning bolt that would be used against the enemies directly. You, as the player, could now stand on your own against a minor group of enemies before you get your defenses up. The ”row-jumping” enemy type was also cut, as it didn’t fit the gameplay. Jumping over defenses was essentially the same as going right through them, so we cut them in favor of the ”Juggernaut”-type, that walked past everything, tanking the damage for his allies and instead running straight for the trees. We were also a bit torn on if the player should actually be a druid or a spirit, but ultimately we decided that the player would be a spirit, since it fit the act of reviving after death much more. The spirit would simply leave its body to create a new one after dying. There is not much to say about the work done on the pitch as work on it was pretty straightforward.
Also, I have done a terrible job at updating the blog, so from now on, I’ll get on to doing that properly.  |
