Big Game Project (week2)

I realized that all you guys reading my blog might not know what Big Game Project is, therefore I will describe it shortly. The Big Game Project is the last course we second year students have at Uppsala University, Campus Gotland.  The game that we are developing will be shown at Gotland Game Conference where everyone attending can play the game, all from jurys, other students and random people attending at the conference.

The second week in big game project has now passed and we already have a playable prototype of our game. But in preparation for our internal Alpha version that should to be done next week my focus has been to make as much placeholders as possible.

The game we are creating is a 3match tower defense game called Tower Offensive. The Materials I made last week are the once the player is matching in order to gather resources to be able to build towers.

At first I continued working with the materials, creating the placeholder animations and specific icons for matching four and five materials together. While matching three the animation remains the same for all the different materials, they merge together and a dust cloud and particles appear. But while matching four or five, each material has its unique animations. Here is the example of glass:

The four pieces of glass merge together and remains whole but cracked on the match field

And while matching five pieces of glass they merge together, instantly displaying the cracked piece of glass and shows how it becomes whole with no cracks in it, and leaves it on the field. Were afraid the animations might be to long for a match 3 game since the tower defense part is going on at the same time, that’s why the placeholders are there so we quickly can find it out.

When all the material placeholder animations were done I continued with the enemy placeholders which were currently programmer art. I kept the concept of each enemy but remade them more suitable for our game.

Programmer placeholders

The remade placeholders I made.

The biggest change I made was to the weakest enemy, ”The Grunt” (enemy to the left). I didnt thing that dual-wield symbolized clear enough for weakness, therefore I changed the grunt into a pikemen with aprooval from the lead designer. In that way the enemy looks more vulnerable than before. Each enemy also got their own animations for when they get hit, walk and death animation.

When I had finished the Enemy placeholders and animations I begun on the four different towers and all separated upgrades that are available. I had some struggle with the different upgrades to represent evolution with each step since everything is from a top down perspective.

These are the first versions I’ve made, but with some feedback from the lead designer I re-designed the Arrow and Ballistic towers. It wasn’t clear if the towers would be animated or not, thereby I would make them simpler and less confusing in case we wouldn’t animate them. For example it would look really strange and confusing for the player if we would not animate the towers and the ballista and stone catapults would remain at the same position without moving towards the enemies.

Here is what I came up with. The main changes that were made was to the ballistic tower, instead of throwing rocks I added canons to easier symbolize the tower. There are still some tweaking to be done on the design before going on to the final results, but for now I’ve put them on ice until our lead artist is back.

At the end of the week we made some changes to the icons for matching four and five materials which I was working with in the beginning of the week. Instead of having an evolution of the same material we decided to have a shield that represents what it’s actually doing. This means that all the material animations I made at the beginning of the week was useless, but in this way the outcome is described on the new icons that we have.

When matching four a shield with arrows appears on the game field (icon to the left). Earlier the player had to match a specific material to use it (match four glass and a glass upgrade appears, which only can be matched with other glasses), but now when we have changed to the shields they can be matched with all materials and not only with the ones that they were created with. The arrow shield cleans of an entire row depending on if the player matches it up or down.

When matching five in a row the question mark shield appears (icon in the middle) which removes all the materials that its matched with (if the shield is matched with coin, then all coins on the field disappears and so forth). The question mark is not a solid design since we believe it can cause confusion, but until now we can’t figure out anything simple and iconic that would represent it.

When matching five ‘’special’’ a shield with an explosion icon appears which explodes all the materials nearby (icon to the right). With a ”speciall” matching I mean as shown below, instead of matching five in a row it looks something like this:

As it is for now almost all placeholder are done for the entire game, but to get a better overwiev of what exactly it is that needs to be done we’ll wait for the lead artist to come back to Gotland, untill then i’ll try to come up with some other ideas for the questionmark shiled and the towers as mentioned before.