Big Game Project – Week 7

We began our crunch this week, working 12 hours a day. It’s been quite exhausting but we’re closer to a finished game.

We made a list of things that needed to be done, anything we could think of. We checked it off as the week went by and most of the high priority tasks were done by the time we went home on Friday.

When I made the waypoint system for the enemies’ movement (covered in a post a while back) I didn’t implement complete functionality for more than one block on the same level. This meant that I was going to have to go back and re-write some of the code once we made a level like that, and that time was this week. It took two days to make it work, but I believe it’s now possible to have any number of blocks on the level and it should work. The only thing I still have to fix is the function to unblock roads when the player sells a block. During the GUI re-work the function to sell the blocks was temporarily removed and until it’s back in the game I can’t properly test whether or not the removal works with the improved waypoint system.

I also added more functionality to the enemy spawner, so that enemies can spawn from multiple points. This wasn’t a huge thing to implement, but it will help in the level design on the later levels.

Last week we made a tutorial for the game. I’ve been working a lot on that one as well, to make it run a bit smoother and never freeze like it sometimes did last week.

I replaced the Slow ability with a new ability called Haste. I made a post a couple of weeks back discussing all the abilities, and last week we decided that Slow was the one that had to go. The new Haste doubles the attack speed of all towers’ on the field, and feels like a solid and unique ability compared to Slow (when we already had Freeze).

The last thing I worked on this week was the score screen that appears after the player completes a level. It needs to show the scores that the player gets from different things. It’s going to be broken down into sections so that matching has it’s own score as well as enemies etc. This is mostly because it feels more rewarding seeing them one by one, but also because they’re going to be “scrolling” up from 0 to the score the player achieved. This includes the Experience bar below the hero as well. We’ll be adding particles and effects for it as well, to make it feel awesome.

Here’s the current version of it (bonus programmer art placeholder). The design of it will probably change, but this is the information we want to show the player.

Until next time!