Testing Feedback Implementation and More

Much of this week's progress was dedicated to improving User Experience and implementing various suggestions derived from last week's testing feedback. I'll first cover what was suggested in that testing session and what has resulted from it (so far).

Testing Feedback

Out of the five general feedback questions proposed on the testing form, only one delivered unexpected results. This was the question relating to game difficulty. While I already knew there were problems with the game's balancing/difficulty, the results from this question were rather interesting, as the responses were quite varied. Below is a graph of the responses, with difficuty scaling from left (hard) to right (easy).

The interesting part about this is that I believed the game to be too easy after a few waves had passed, while the graph shows that more people found it difficult than easy. This is potentially because the game is initially more difficult, but gets easier later on. The challenge for me is to find the right difficulty curve and implement it so that the level of difficulty stays relatively constant throughout gameplay. While some of this week's changes address this, there is still more to do in this regard.

The next thing to cover in the feedback is the suggested list of potential features. This question asked participants to rank areas of improvement for the game from first preference through to third. I suggested five features to choose from:

• Different Enemy Types
• More Tower Types
• Tower Upgrade Variety (rather than just upgrading damage)
• Upgrades for the Player
• More Player Interaction (e.g. activities other than shooting)

The graph below shows the outcome of this question.

As can be seen, the most popular suggestion was Different Enemy Types, which was closely followed by Tower Upgrade Variety. Enemy Variety is something that has been taken into account in this week's changes, and will be discussed in further detail below. Other suggestions may be something to look into further down the track, but are not currently the top priority.

Only one bug was reported during the testing (and it wasn't much of a bug either, more an oversight). This was that the money caps at 999, while tower upgrades can (eventually) cost more than that. This bug was fixed in this week's changes.

Enemy Changes

While there is still the (likely) potential to expand this system further, a basic armour system for enemies has been implemented, and with it, the addition of an armour piercing modifier for towers. For right now, the only tower to have armour piercing bullets is the APR - as mentioned in the early design ideas for the towers. The armour system as it is now takes half of the enemies in each wave and gives them a thin layer of armour, which reduces the damage they take, unless that damage is piercing. For now, these enemies have a static armour value of 2, which reduces incoming damage by roughly half. The plan is to have armour values increase depending on factors such as the wave count. Below is a demonstration of an armoured enemy (darker coloured) blocking damage from a HMG Tower.

Enemy (and player) graphics are still in the works, but I am currently prioritising gameplay over aesthetics.

Main and Pause Menus

This week's biggest changes were the implementation of a Pause Menu for the main game, and a Main Menu for the start of the game. The Main Menu can also be navigated back to from the game, which allows players to restart the game without reloading the page entirely. Both menus include yet-to-be-implemented functionality for saving and loading, which will eventually allow players to save their progress in the game and pick up where they left off next time they play. There is also a settings dialog on each menu which currently allows the player to change the in-game volume, which I will elaborate on below. First, here's a screenshot of the Main Menu, showing off the new background image and logo.

Music

This version of the game is the first to implement sound in the form of music. Both tracks were taken from the Free Music Archive. The Main Menu theme is Orpheus's Walk by Sci Fi Industries, and the Game theme is Home Alone (Sci Fi Industries Remix) by Human Being. Sound effects like enemies dying and towers firing will also be implemented in the coming future.

Work on this project is being coming to a close, with the final touches being implemented over the course of next week. This means that next week's update is going to be major. Don't miss it!