The WatchTower by Blindseeker's Oath (itch.io)
To be honest, the game isn't that great right now. It has potential, but as of yet, it needs work. Despite this, development has been great! The game has really allowed me to build up crucial skills, such as camera shakes, damage shaders, and an atrocious fog enemy : the Hostile Brume. Now, you couldn't know how much I care about the project, not without a demonstration! But please read further after you see this :
The Obvious Flaws
There are some things that you see wrong with this project, and I would like to go into what those are, and how they will be changed. First of all, the framerate in this video is horrible--the real game actually runs very well (in the video, I was able to bring the archer count to 4,000 at 1:52 !).
So, the game is not all that great (okay, really not great at all) well, I have news for you. In case you haven't noticed, I am not nearly done with it. I said this game is going to be highly polished (in my standards), so highly polished it shall be. And that is why I would like to tell you what I have planned. (Also, don't forget to scroll to the bottom, where I have a few excuses for why the project is so gnarly)
of course, how could a game like this not have one?! The player (of course) is going to level up by killing enemies, which (yes, it's cliche) fills up a progress bar. The upgrades may include : Health, New Arrows, More Archers, More Arrow Velocity, And whatever else I can find to add. I will add this as a way of decluttering the player's screen (by removing UI elements).
So, there has to be some sort of real challenge in a game like this. There must be some sort of goal for the player to say, "I've got to prepare for this." And that is why I am going to add bosses to the game. I don't quite know how they will spawn or how to keep the player from easily defeating them, but I will figure all that out. perhaps the player will have some sort of power level meter (it's over 9000!) that will determine when and what will spawn, and the more powerful the player gets, the more powerful the bosses get. Though I may just have an array of bosses, and add new ones as the player levels up. Then spawn random ones at some specific point. The reason I would have a predictable spawn time, is so that the player will want to prepare for it.
The enemies are clearly too sloppy. They just charge like buffoons, dying and spawning endlessly in vain. I mean, I tested with three arrows, and was able to survive all the way until there were 172 enemies in a wave, without getting hit even once! That's pretty sad. But thankfully, those are only the basic enemies. They are the "grunts" of this game, and exist to be exterminated. Though that sounds harsh, it's true, and that's good because the players need (>!FEEDBACK!<) . So, I will add more enemies. One enemy I am going to add(yet another highly polished one), is this little fog thingy:
It is meant to represent a puff of cloud carrying a large stone. The stone, when hit, will snap arrows that hit it, which will make it more difficult to kill. When this enemy reaches it's safest position (above the player tower), it will drop down and create a satisfying crunch. The animation for this shouldn't take too long I hope (not like the Hostile Brume), because it does not follow a path like the other one, it will just slightly shift about. The death animation could actually use the falling animation. Though once it hits the ground, it may have to use the Hostile Brume's explosion. It will be fun adding other enemies with more character (actually my weakness when it comes to drawing), and I feel that by adding lots of variation in the game (for instance, I didn't name the Hostile Brume, "Hostile Whisp," or something common like that...I looked up other words for "fog"), it gives off a sense of originality. And that is what we are trying to accomplish with the games we make--originality.
Okay, so I have arrows that fire out of the castle. Well, I don't know if you saw in the video, but the arrows are randomized (as in, the arrows fired are different colored). What you also probably didn't notice, is that they actually have different stats. currently, the red arrows deal more damage, the white arrows are faster (which provides for range), and the white arrows are...white arrows--they don't do anything special. Well, I am also going to add arrows that have different effects. Of course, they will all have average stats (damage, speed, piercing), but they will also have different effects. I recently discovered the magic of hierarchies, which I will be using to create various arrows and enemies. This is useful, because of what I plan on adding to the upgrade system.
The player finally finishes barraging a massive troll headed for the castle gates! He watches as his XP bar fills quickly to the brim, then begins overflowing with sweet golden elixir. His power has gained to the point of leveling up! A flashy display is thrown in his face, with animated characters moving about the screen. He selects to upgrade arrow damage, and gets back in the game for the final boss fight. With 1+ damage, who can stop him!
Do you see what is wrong with this? There was an epic boss fight, a flashy upgrade menu, a beautiful Xp bar...but the upgrade itself was weak. It's not that the added damage was low. The problem is that there wasn't enough (>!FEEDBACK!<). The reason for this, is that the only thing effected is a number on a display. The player will continue going on fighting with the same old arrows, the same old castle, and in the same old world. Something must change! There must be more feedback!
--Anyway, that is why I am changing the arrow system. I would like diversity.
Yeah, there will have to be a change in sprites. The king is really bad. I will certainly change him. Don't have much else to--WAIT! Actually, I do have something to say! I am really looking forward to creating new enemy sprites and stuff. I am seriously improving on my capabilities for creating structures, and my landscapes aren't atrocious, but my characters are pure evil.
I am actually pretty interested in this one (am I not interested in all of them!?), because I haven't made music for a game before. I will have several tracks that the player can switch through easily, and the Death Scene soundtrack will be fun. I wonder if I could get someone else to add some tracks in...
Oh yeah, and I am also going to obviously improve all the other audio. Certainly going to add some enemy sounds in.
Oh boy. I need one of these. Guess I could wait for a while though.
Yeah, I am planning on adding a rainy scene in there.
I will certainly need to change the UI, as it currently looks like child drawings. This is essential for the end product, but can wait for quite some time.
The first thing I would like to put in here, is that little whisp enemy(the Hostile Brume). And the reason why, is that I spent a heck of a lot of time putting it together. The code wasn't so bad, it was the art that took forever. Here is the reason why.
I started with this enemy, by drawing little doodles of clouds. They were very nasty, bent up things, hardly the shape I wanted them to be, and nasty coloring. I hadn't found the method of drawing these that I used at this point, so next I simply drew lines for the paths :
After testing these for a while (putting them in the editor and playing them), I chose the first as the animation path of choice,
which I then used for this :
After toiling with the correct way it should look, I settled on a solution. This took an intense amount of moving between brushes, colors, and layers in Krita. After putting it in the game, I realized that it had too much detail, so I blurred it into what is now there.
What happened before I added the Hostile Brume, was actually quite fun. I rewrote every script in the game.
This has happened before (during the Pass the Game Jam). I did this with Breakfast Wars. The code written was not clean (no offense FloppyGameDev), so I started afresh...and ended up making my first automation game. Unfortunately, the game was never published, as it never made it to the end. But hey, it was fun none the less! Anyway, my goal from the beginning was to write clean code for The Wacthtower, but I changed that goal when I got a bit tired out, to write any code I can, then fix it later...that turned out well, because I got a lot done, then got experience in writing really clean code without worrying about adding new features. But after that, I felt a lot better about the whole thing.
This was worked on before The Big Rewrite, and took a lot of time to figure out. I wasn't using events for it at the time, so implementing it for the enemies and tower was rather difficult. But once figured it out, I was able to finally fix what was wrong with the whole game by rescripting it all.
This is really important, as it drives the entire end product of the project. I didn't document this stuff at all, but I did keep feature creep pretty well locked away in a prison cell I wrote:
featureCreep.ThrowInTheDungeons( );
Any help you can give would be deeply appreciated. So, how can you help me make the project? There are a variety of ways!
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