The first set of changes I’ve made to the game were to add a tower design section. My current idea is that as you play levels, you will earn pieces of equipment for your towers. Then you’ll go into the tower design to equip each of your towers.
Players will only be able to use the top 4 towers at a time, but they will be able to design up to 8. Each tower will have a basic type, but the equipment will give customization, either to increase the tower’s abilities, or to decrease the cost of the towers. Currently, all you can do is reorder the towers. I think for a temporary fix I’ll implement the ability to manually adjust the tower stats so that I can test new builds.
Initial version completed last night
I’ve updated it slightly since uploading this video. Now the buttons slide into their new order over a 0.25 second animation, making it more clear which towers are moving and what the new order is.
The next things I’ll be working on are:
1. Actually allowing tower stats to be changed.
2. Saving the tower designs to the local machine.
3. Adding a couple different base tower types (such as an instant fire laser and an area of effect tower).
Well, we finished up around 5 and you can play the results for yourself here. Unfortunately, we didn’t get the chance to actually put a win condition in there for our one and only map. We also didn’t get around to making any additional towers, so you’re stuck with the standard tower. It’s currently getting a 1.85/5 rating on Kongregate.
Currently, our plan is for each of us to take the results and add on to it ourselves to see who can make a better game. Perhaps the updated versions will actually rate as games instead of just prototypes of games. We’ll see…
Overall, I’m very happy with the results of this weekend. This kind of tempts me to submit the current prototype of my TBS game, but I don’t think it’s quite ready. Hopefully some time soon.
Now that Ken is more familiar with coding a game in general and with AS3 specifically, I think we’ll try another one of these game jams in the future. It was incredibly productive and I felt like a learned a lot from the experience too.
Ok, so lot’s of coding done over the last 24 hours. The game now acts like an actual game, just without the help interface bits that make it possible to understand the rules. And without the restrictions of needing funds in game to purchase towers. And without any actual strategy because there’s only one tower type and one enemy type. But now it works.
Here’s a video of the results so far.
Next is making a more interesting map, more towers, more enemies and an actual game mechanic where you can win or lose.
My friend Ken and I started a game jam Friday night. I’ve been up working on this game for almost 9 hours now, and while what I have doesn’t look too impressive, there’s a lot of planning that’s already been completed as well as a few technological issues caused by Windows Vista (his computer, not mine). Also, it’s been mostly me on the programming because he’s both more sensitive to alcohol and less sensitive to caffeine.
I figured I’d post the results so far for all to see. It’s not much: a tiled map generator, a “Tower” that fires bullets at (0,0), sound effects, music and a mute button. But I think we’ve laid a good foundation and have a good plan of attack for the next 36-48 hours. Without further ado, here’s the game currently.
Hopefully we’ll have much more come tomorrow afternoon. Stay tuned!
So after doing 3 hours of programming from scratch I only have the bare bones of my game completed. I did manage to make my level select screen and the rest of the game is in much better shape than it was before. Unfortunately the new game is still a good 3-4 hours short of being a full prototype.
This is what I had after 45 minutes of programming
I think the lesson to learn from this is don’t attempt to complete a prototype from scratch in one sitting if you’re not a great programmer. Also, don’t start at 11 PM if you know staying up past 2 AM isn’t a realistic expectation. I’m guessing the people that do this from scratch thing probably have more tools than just basic actionscript 3 at their disposal. Once I have my game working again I may have to look into it to see what’s out there.
A Game Jam is a programming session undertaken with the intention of creating a complete and working game prototype. Since I had so many issues when I went to integrate my level selection screen, I’ve decided that I’m going to start from scratch and see what I can do. If all goes well, I’ll post a picture of the new version of the game tomorrow.
I know I can stay up until at least 2 AM, so that’s at least 3 hours of work. Having already made the prototype of the game once that should be enough to get everything working as it does now. Since I already know what mistakes I made the first time, it might actually work better after I’m done with this. Wish me luck!
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