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Design (what I set out to do): When I began to create this game, I wanted to greatly improve upon the ghost shooter game. I wanted there to be a main sprite, shooter who would stay in one spot to defend the home base, then I wanted several enemies to come towards this home base to attack it. I also wanted several different “shooter boosters” to change the lasers being shot as well as improve the health and appearance of the home base. I wanted there to be some form of economy and score through the shooting of independently moving sprites. So that when a certain sprite was hit, more “starfuls” would be collected as well as points. I wanted the people playing the game to feel, excited, happy, calm, and be able to have a laugh about the game. I wanted the colors to reflect this mood and I wanted the color scheme to be one of the largest ways to set the mood, so I chose a color that I thought would be universally well-liked and went with it. Some of the improvements I wished to make upon the ghost shooter game were being able to change the types of bullets (in my case, lasers) coming from the main sprite as well as their speed. I also wished to be able to change home base so that there were instances in which it had more defense mechanisms as well as creating the ability to change the appearance of the main sprite (homebase) so its colors changed and its size. I also wished to have more independently moving sprites to create different effects whereas in the ghostshooter game there were only the enemies to shoot at. I also wanted to have multiple ways of keeping score. I wanted the player to win the game when all “starfuls” were collected and if all enemies were destroyed and if all health was still intact by the time all enemies were destroyed. |
What Didn't Get Done: I was unable to change the defense mechanism of the homebase as well as its color and winning the game was caused by all the enemies being destroyed rather than the many variables I had wished before, the goal of the game was revised in this sense... although players could still keep track of how well they were doing based on health, score, and number of starfuls. I also wanted my enemies to come from certain directions once certain checkpoints were reached however, this idea was revised due to the behavior of the enemies because they would bounce off the walls and come from all sorts of directions. |
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Biggest Challenge: Finding art that had the same color scheme, as well as the same type of art, and then editing it was extremely time consuming and I wish I had known before that it would take up more of my time than I had thought. It also took a great amount of time to figure out where my sprites should go. I think my biggest challenge was finding out if I should insert objects as sprites, backgrounds, tiled backgrounds or something else because each had different variables. I also had great trouble with layers and layouts. I did not know how to change between layers and layouts in the game so most of the time I ended up inserting different screens as sprites and then having them appear at different events. However, this often left the game with a lot of glitches. For instance, at the event in which a player would win the game, I would have the homebase spawn a large sprite screen that would say something like “Congratulations, you won!” but when it spawned, the screen would create multiple, neverending sprites that would move in the behaviour of the homebase as well. I tried to change the visibility of the sprite and tried to insert it as a layout as well but nothing seemed to work. It became very difficult to figure out and thus there was great trouble in changing levels. |
What's Next: I would like to improve upon the opening screen as well as the winning screen, I wanted to make them more interactive in which players could press different buttons and view tutorials and move on to different levels. I would love to also improve the spawning of my enemy because I could never quite figure out just how to get the enemies to spawn randomly and come from certain directions. I would also like to make the game a little less busy at the beginning and then create a more chaotic busy feel. |