Greeting trainers!
I'm glad to announced that I have completed the first prototype! Huzzah! I've embedded the prototype below and as you will soon find out, there isn't much to do at all beside placing your cosmoids into different spots and moving them around.
You can do that by click on the orange spots and selecting pressing one of the 6 buttons. Once the Cosmoids are weak with the red bar you can click on them to "Capture" them. Also if you hover your mouse towards the bottom of the prototype you can full screen the game to get a better view of the characters.
So we have the most basic idea of our game here, it may not look like much but a lot of thought went into everything you see there. It's pretty mind blogging to see the big AAA games out there when you think about every little decisions they have to make. Everything you see in a game or a movie was something somebody thought about and wanted to be there. Nothing is be chance.
An example of this is when I was doing the new tower positioning system. Normally you place a cosmoids in a spot, the avatar walks there and places it. If you select the same cosmoid for another spot then that cosmoid will walk to that spot. Seems pretty simple right?
Well then you run into odd scenarios, what if we are trying to place a Cosmoid in a spot where another Cosmoid is already there, what if we assign two cosmoids to the same empty spot? All these combinations must be thought about and handled in the programming. As you play the prototype, try these different scenarios and see what kind of solutions I came up with.
This is something you can also do in any game you play, as you play try different things and keep in mind that a designer had to think about and make decisions as to what should happen in that scenario.
So now that the prototype is done, we clearly see that there are many thing that are still missing. So we will now start the Prototype version 2, for version 2 I will be focusing more on the User Interface, the menus for capturing Cosmoids, for leveling up, for seeing when the next wave of enemies will come. Over the years I have always proclaimed that I hated working on the UI but it is so vital for games because it shows the correct information to the player. It is a fine balance between showing the right information and not having too much on the screen.
You will also notice that I have started to add design task as well as art task to the list. When you develop you need to assign time into design. I imagine in bigger companies you would have a person assigned for design and a different one for programming, in our case I'm handling both. Next week I will talk about the changes I have for level up and experience and how they will be different from the PTD series.
Prototype v2 Task:
- Design - How will leveling up and experience work? (100% Completed)
- Programming - Scrolling the map (30% See next blog post)
- Design - Incoming Wave Alert System (See next blog post)
- Design - How much enemy unit information will you have in level? Before the level? (See next blog post)
- Art - Incoming Wave Alert Icon Placeholder Graphic (See next blog post)
- Art - Unit UI Graphics Used for buttons or menus (See next blog post)
- Programming - Incoming Wave Alert Location Tracking (See next blog post)
- Programming - Incoming Wave Alert UI Popup and Confirmation (See next blog post)
- Design - How to view friendly unit information? leveling up? targeting options? (See next blog post)
Thanks for reading and see you next week!
