Programming & Level Designing Tower Offensive, Pt 2

So it’s time for an update on what I did last week.

I said in the last post that I would write from the office, apparently I lied because I’m at home writing this now, two days late as well, I blame Easter… Back to what I did last week, It wasn’t much because Easter and relatives and family. I spent most of my time with bug fixing our GUI but I had time some smaller things as well. I managed to add some feedback to the Hero Ability GUI button and hotkey for it (It flashes when it is ready to use) and I also started to improve in the GUI layout, it became better but I’m not satisfied with it yet. I started to balance the enemies (run speed & hp) and towers(buy costs, fire rate, damage dealing & similar stuff). I must say it’s hard to get it good,especially with our game, because a lot depens on how good the matching board looks in the start of the level. Some times I won with ease and other times I lost even before I had a chance to place a tower( I might have exaggerated a little). So how do we solve something like that when the matching board is all random(we are going to play around with it later, see what happens when it’s not so random)? Well by lowering the cost for all towers and trying to estimate how much resources a player gets when he owns special lands that provides bonuses and thinking of how effective the towers would be with a few upgrades on them(We didn’t have tower upgrades implemented when I did this, but we got them today) and taking in account how much resources an average matching board would give in the start of the level and at last adding hero abilities to it. With that in my head I changed some numbers and I think I got quite close to a good set up, It will of course need a lot of more work before it becomes good, but I don’t think I can do much better without having all the things needed implemented. So I continued to work on level four and then the week was over, I wont tell you what I have been doing yesterday or today, that will be in the next post and It will have an ”Before and after” image, I think you are going to like the result 🙂

Picture for this week is going to be of my idea to our GUI that I didn’t became satisfied with it. It is a clumsy ”made in paint” image I did so I could share my idea with our producer,  It looks horrible! 😀

 

 

 

 

 

 

Programming & Level Designing Tower Offensive, Pt 1

Hey, It’s time to write again.

This time it’s for another course at UUCG (Uppsala University Campus Gotland) called Big Game Project.

The course is about creating a game over 10 weeks.

I’m the lead programmer for the game Tower Offensive. I’m not sure how much I’m allowed to tell at this moment since we haven’t posted much about it at our dev blog yet.  But at least we got a  matching element. So what do I do? Well I got the role of lead programmer because I had the most experience working with Unity (Game Engine) and I didn’t mind the little extra responsibility. I’m also the level designer and the main GUI guy(technical part, I can barely draw a circle in Photoshop so I don’t mess with that). I’m not exactly sure how I got the last part but I don’t mind, It’s fun. Now to answer the question, I make sure the programmers are working on the right things, delivers on time and give them some help if they need it. At the same time I’m setting up levels, fixing GUI layout and setting up the code needed for it.  Now I’m supposed to write what I did last week, what I have learnt and stuff like that so better get to it.

The last two weeks ( Yes, I ”forgot” to write the first week) I have been doing little on almost everything. While the two other programmers was working on the main parts I had to create some of the smaller systems, like..well I’m going to ask the producer what I can write so I don’t write something secret. (some minutes later) Mohahaha I can write what I want! So I have been working on buying and placing towers, it’s a quite simple grid system, pretty standard. I have been helping out with the matching system a bit. Level design and scripts for it, I decided to start with level 5 out of 9 because all of the elements will be used at that time which makes it easier for us to test everything in time and then just make it easier for the lower levels and harder for the higher levels. I set up GUI System with buttons, Text and yeah well a picture says more than a 1000 words. In conclusion: A lot of small stuff just because it was that start of the project. Next week will be a lot more structured for me because we got all the systems for the levels now and I’m going to write the next post from the office where I can see everything I have worked with and not just write down something chaotic like this.

Well this is how I looks like At the moment. (stolen picture from my Producer)