Two Tanks
Abstract
In creating my game I had a few gameplay goals that I wanted to achieve. The first one was making the game difficult but not making is so difficult that the player would want to quit. I achieved this by playtesting it with multiple people and seeing if they could beat it or not. When it was difficult for them I would increase the number of lives they had and see if they did better until I found an average amoung players that I could use. The way I would determine if it was too difficult or not was based on how many times the player would die in the game. I wanted the player to experience a death a few times in the game and also wanted them to progress at a reasonable pace. Another goal we had was to make this game multiplayer. To achieve this goal we had to map the different player keys to one keyboard. Going into this project I didn't have much of an aesthetic design goal but by the end, I made it clear. I started out by wanting everything to be just plain pixel art, something that I could easily draw and possibly fit a goal. When I made the first sketch of my drawings they had almost this rustic feel to them so I adopted that style for the rest of them, making them both simplistic pixel art and rustic at the same time. I also chose to make the walls in my game solid black because I felt that they fit with the theme and they stood out among the chaos. Another element that I chose to add was to make the players and enemies more detailed compared to other elements in the game. It helps the player Identify who they are and who the enemy is. One in-class concept that I used was the gameplay story balance. Our game is heavily focused on the gameplay rather than a story. The story is mainly what the players can interpret from each level. Another in-class concept that we used hyperlinks. Whenever the two players reach there destination the game switches to the next level. It continues to do this until the game has been beaten. Another thing that we did that was discussed in class was buff and nerf different aspects of our game until we found the right balance. These things included how many times the enemy tank could fire per second, how many times the player tank could fire per second, how many times the turret could fire per second, how many lives the player had, how many turrets were there, how many tanks were there, and the number of power-up in each map. We would assess most of this stuff based on how the player would respond to it in the game and how well the player would overcome or use these different aspects of our game One innovative thing that we put in our game was the multiplayer feature. I did this by mapping two sets of controls to one keyboard. We wanted the player to have to communicate with his partner in making most of the in-game decisions. We didn't want the game to feel like most other multiplayer games where the players are pitted against each other, not required to communicate or long distances away from each other. Another innovative thing that we did in our game was to create an instructions section. This helped the players understand the controls in our game and what the power-ups do before they even start playing the game. We responded to the playtesting feedback in a number of different ways. Most people when starting out the game did not know the controls or what any of the power-ups did in the game, so we started out by adding an instructions page to our game. We also adjusted the number of lives each player got at the end of our feedback to make it more balanced. We also made the bullets different colors to distinguish the player bullets from the enemy bullets because when we first started out you couldn't tell if the oncoming bullets would damage you or not. We also adjusted the tank's speed in the game to make them slower. This was a result of some players rushing to the end of the levels while dodging all of the bullets. By slowing it down just a little bit the players were no longer able to dodge the bullets.