Programming & Level Designing Tower Offensive, Pt 6 After GGC

Hey!

So GGC is over and it’s just the post mortem left for me before I start my summer courses. So this post is going to be the last one for the Big game project course, If you want to keep track of our work during the summer I would recommend our website, It will be updated regularly about our work (probably more often than this blog). So check it out!

During GGC we got a lot of feedback from a lot of different people, It was great , most of it positive  and tips on how to improve the game. That is just what we are going to do, as soon as everyone in the team has written their post mortem and had a few days of rest we are going to improve the game and add more content to it. One of the first things we are going to iterate on is the GUI, We have finally decided to just focus on tablets (and hopefully find a way to get it to feel good on smartphones too) instead of having a ”universal” GUI for both PC and tablet. So I get to change the GUI again and I don’t have to think of how it would be on a PC so I can change it into how I wanted it now 😀  I’m very eager to start working again and hope I get time to do it soon.

 

Programming & Level Designing Tower Offensive, Pt 5 (Level 7-9)

Hello again!

This time it’s level 7-9, unfortunately Level 10 is cut off from our GGC plan (on my order), It needs some more work before I show it to the world and there are some other things that are going to require my time that are more important than a new level. Nine levels for a 10 week project with 8ish weeks of production before showcasing will simply have to do. But fear not, It’s going to show up later, and it will be a ”new behavior” level, I can’t let you play more than three levels without giving you a new challenge 😉

Level 7

So my main though for level seven was ”Roads”, So two paths with two matching fields and a road connecting the two paths together, It became quite hard and quite weird, but not a total disaster, It feels like something is missing on it but I haven’t figured it out yet. So It will survive until I can figure something out to make it better but still mixing some of the different aspects we are using now.

Level 8

Main though was ”Speed” I wanted this to become a rush level with loads of fast enemies  charging the main camp. It turns out that a player can’t match resources at the speed of light so the big ”rush” waves is the two last ones. just to give the player a fighting chance to survive. The level got two matching fields but they are bigger than level 6 so they work better, but not perfect. I think I know what to do about it, but that would be implemented after GGC. So the though that might fix it is to fix the spawning chances for the different fields, so one field has a big chance for a few resources and the other field has a higher chance to spawn the other resources that’s available. It could work, at least worth testing.

Level 9

Last level to showcase, I wanted it to be hard but not impossible. So one big matching field just to give the player a chance, then have two roads splitting  up to three roads leading to the camp. It became hard, maybe too hard, The key to victory is to close of one path at the beginning before the get divided to three paths, and then just create a defense with all you got. So yeah this would work as an end game level but not as a level 9, players that are new to both tower defense and match 3 needs a few more levels to be prepared for something like this. It will not be a level showing up early in the game later on. but for GGC, sure why not?

 

Programming & Level Designing Tower Offensive, Pt 4 (Level 4-6)

So level 4-6 this time. I’m going to do like last post, just write something short about the levels. And yes I’m doing more than three levels a week, There are a lot of other things I do but I kinda wanted to write this in a nice order.

Level 4

This level introduces two paths to the player. I  took the layout for level 1 and just added another road, because this is usually a big step for players, they need to focus on defending two roads while matching for resources, and they have usually just unlocked our magic tower so it’s one more resource on the matching field to get use to as well. So an old road layout with a slightly larger matching field felt like a good choice to do this on.

Level 5

This became our ”icon” level, it was the first one in the game and we did almost all our system testing on it. The main thought though was Mid-Game. the players should have played some levels before this one, even multiple paths. So by dividing the roads in the beginning the players has a perfect level to use the block tower on (well It’s absolutely possible without the block tower, but it’s harder). But in order to get the block tower, they need to gather a lot of stone, so they would probably need to use their Ability to help them survive until they can buy the block tower. In that way the player is ”forced” to use all the things at his/hers disposal to win.

Level 6

The last of the introduction levels (just for ggc, I wants loads of new things for the levels later).  Two matching fields, yeah things are getting interesting now! Well this gives the player something more to do, when they are playing on a tablet they could match resources on two fields at the same time, but it’s also harder as well, two separate fields means that they are small and that means less chance to get power-ups. Well the main though was to show the players that we are going to use dual fields and later on add special behaviors on them and things like that. Matching is not going to become boring the further in to the levels they get. But let’s start at two regular fields at the same time. I also want to add that this level became bad, the matching fields became too small, it’s playable but not really enjoyable, this is probably the first level I’m going to change as soon as I get some more time on my hands.

Programming & Level Designing Tower Offensive, Pt 3 (Level 1-3)

So this post will be about level 1-3 in the game, As I mentioned in an earlier post I started at level 5 and when it was in I planned the lower levels (1-4) and I have now created level 1-3. of a total of 10 planned, All the levels for ggc will be to showcase what diversity we could have on the levels after 10 weeks and what they could expect later, and how much more we could add to create even more challenges.

Level 1

The main though on this level was Simplicity, It’s going to be the tutorial level, the first level the player experience. So a fairly big matching field(to help the matching), a single road(enemies goes from point a to point b without anything special happening) and few places for towers(to not overwhelm the players with choices in the beginning).

Level 2

This level was about introducing ”optimal” tower placements. it has two areas where towers could reach the enemies from two sides, doing more damage over time since the enemies has to move past it two times and if they survived they needed to move past yet another ”choke point”. So two choke points to help the player realize that there are sometimes on some levels more efficient places to put towers.

Level 3

This level was about increasing the difficulty, taking the layout on level 2 but removing a choke point and throwing some different kinds of enemies on the player, It has a choke point in the beginning  like the one on level 2  but upside down and then straight roads to the camp. By having a green theme applied to it also helped to give it a ”fresh” feeling and not much of the repetition feel it might give of otherwise.

Well this was all for the time,  Level 4-6 is next on the agenda. Cya!

 

 

 

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)