After the Cookie Clicker game i learnt a few things coding wise and also Art style wise. The Space Invader style game requires us to be able to move left and right and optionally up and down, while also having the ability to shoot on coming enemies. This was a drastic change over the previous game due to the Cookie Clicker game being practically just buttons that you press. This means almost all the code from Cookie Clicker cannot be applied to this project.
Prototype 1
To start of with i feel like this attempt was a really good first prototype. I have a few reasons as to why i liked this version of the game, for one, the art style was simplistic yet recognizable without straying too far out of the bounds.
I made the art almost the same as the original to make it seem more reputable, due to space invaders already being a reputable game. ( i did change the art later down the line )
I also liked how all the code just.. worked! it all felt smooth and i wouldn’t have to drastically change the code later down the line like in the Cookie Clicker game.
I would like to point out that since the art style was similar to the original the second prototype was made to try and change that.
Prototype 2
The seocnd prototype was made in mid of an art style that i wish didn’t steal from some one else. This in mid though i did forget some things.
- The health counter was not fixed at this time.
- The player model felt a bit to bright for the background I have on.
A few things i liked about the game was the enemies actually looked like their engines were on with particle emitters.
Prototype 3
The Final prototype
The Final prototype had me think what made these types of games fun to play with. Therefore, i made each enemy have a different colour and a different size to show the player what they are good for. Such as Bigger == Tanky.
Secondly i made the background look alot nicer than the pixelated graphic shown before. i did this because the player and all subsequent enemy’s also had a higher res to their sprites.
One of the last things not code related is that the health counter now shows the player image and also makes sure that there is no outline if you lose a life. I felt like it distracted the player a bit too much.
I feel confident with the final prototype due to how fun i have when playing it myself. I feel like if the creator has that much fun with the final product, then the people playing it who haven’t had to keep playing it over and over to find bugs; will also have a moderate amount of fun playing it as well.
Concept Piece
These two concepts were the starting’s of the end ship that I went with. the one on the left was more based off of the original design, sticking with the more tank like shape. However, that doesn’t really belong in space. so I created the ship design on the right. I liked the 3 pronged idea and stuck with it and it sort of became one of the main design structures.
Final Design
As seen, I made the 3 prongs at the very top, made the body of the ship sleeker and more aerodynamically safe, and gave it wings with thrusters on them because it looked cool. design wise it makes sense for turning left and right, but overall the design itself I am really proud of.
Animation
Due to not needing proper animated pixel art, I am able to use the built in tools to control the scale, location and rotation of the animations. using these features I can create an animation controller and set it up like this. this just tells the game it can go from any state to a different state smoothly.
Animation window in Unity
Using Prefabs
using prefabs is a core asset of this project, this is because any time an alien is called it has to call a prefab to spawn. using the prefabs set data it can carry out its order of operations with its components.
Prefab tab
Alien Prefabs
Prefabs are also a great way to quickly move from scene to scene without copy and paste. For example I have the alien Prefabs and on each one I have different health and speeds for each, to make it more different than the other.
In Conclusion
In conclusion i feel like this was a lesson to teach us how to code our own movement and how to tweak it our selves. making the momentum and movement just right to make the player feel like they have more control makes them think it’s a better game. Having this game before the Top Down Shooter means that we can move over some of our code such as the movement code due too how similar these games are from each other. Space Invaded.
Overall i think this was a good step down the line to help us the students learn Game Design.