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This is Part 6 of my ongoing journey in the making of this TD game. It is currently Week 6 since the start of this game’s development on 21 Nov.

The game is actually ready to play…sort of. I got balancing done (and this is the most tedious part) for the first 20 maps on the Normal difficulty and partially Hard Difficulty. For the record, I intend for this game to have 25-30 Campaign maps and 15-20 Challenge maps. I have yet to balance the Nightmare difficulty. Currently, it is impossible to attempt it, but with a few more features in place perhaps it will be possible.

But let’s start with what has been done for the past week. I’ll start with something really exciting.

New Bosses!

I managed to add a few more epic bosses (not drawn to scale). The first one is the Terminator, and the second is currently the most interesting epic boss:

I talked about using summoning runes as a story element in the previous post – they are objects on the map that can spawn monsters. And the epic boss I just drew can turn himself into a summoning rune! And when he does, he starts spawning monsters!!!

This was a very VERY tricky thing to do. To achieve this effect, I had to make use of almost everything I had coded so far – my spawn script, my rune script, my summoning rune animation, and this is the first enemy in the game to require an animation ‘controller’ to handle my different animation states and to also trigger the spawning at the correct frames.

Here’s a frame by frame animation I drew:

Also, a bit of deception – there isn’t actually a summoning rune on the map when the animation occurs. I actually wanted to make it such that when the animation is complete, the boss is set to invisible, then I set a summoning rune to the boss’ location, and enable the rune for 20 seconds because my summoning rune has an automated script to spawn monsters. In the end though, I decided to go with the boss = rune approach. This had pros and cons.

To date, all my enemies only need a single walk animation. But this beast has 3 animations:

• Walking
• Transform into summoning rune
• Summoning animation
• Transform back to normal (reverse of animationClip #2)

There was one con to my approach of making the rune and the boss the same thing – During spawning, the enemy will also stop moving and the tricky thing is, this epic boss flies – which means in his moving state, he has to be on top of all the ground monsters. BUT, when he is in a summoning state, he has to be BELOW the other monsters.

Again this required some manual work by shifting the boss along the z-axis during the animation transitioning. I also modified my move script to make the boss stop all movement when he is summoning stuff.

Ultimately everything worked and the insane amount of effort was worth it when I played out my battle against this beast.

The boss is actually in the top left corner. You can’t really see him since I took the screenshot at a bad frame – he camouflages with the mobs underneath him. But the fight was very epic.

Sadly, I lost at my own game. I ended up having -17 lives too. Wait-what? That’s a bug. I NEED TO FIX IT NOW!!!!

I think this is the most time-consuming epic boss I have made. The map also lives up to its reputation. It has a gigantic rune in the middle and this rune too has some special effects up its sleeves every 7 waves. It also has its own animations! (If you want to read up about what runes are in my game, it is mentioned briefly in Part 5, my previous post)

I seriously cannot wait to let people try out this map! I used to say that Map #10 looked like the final level because it had 2 special effects.

Then I made Map #15 and it had 3 special effects!

This is currently Map #20. And now that I’ve made my third epic map, I can say that Map #20 is totally badass.

I put a lot of effort into each of my maps and my creeps – and it’s not just the special effects, but right down to each of the creep’s individual animations, and I really hope some people who play my game will notice that because the creeps in the game are actually really small.

New Creeps

I have a few new creeps, some of them are for my Challenge maps. I’ve drawn golems, elementals, and upgraded versions of current creeps.

But there is one creep which is particularly interesting because it is the first monster that is able to debuff your turrets:

Not related to enemies directly, but I added a neat visual display to show a red arrow on turrets that are debuffed and a green arrow on turrets that are being buffed.

New Turrets

I finished up the drawing my last second turret, The Arc. Unlike normal turrets, this turret occupies a gridspace of 2 x 2 grids. I may be changing this turret’s graphic in the final game if I have time for something better-looking.

The reason why I wasn’t quite satisfied with the final result is simple. You can actually tell that when I was drawing the turret above, I was confined to a tiny gridspace in the shape of a square. However, upon getting inspired and actually letting myself draw without limitations against an actual full map background, I was able to draw a few drafts of what I actually envisioned as the ‘ultimate turret’.

I for one, would like to see an epic turret capable of shooting swords to impale my enemies!

More special maps

One of the things I really enjoy is drawing maps. I try to make maps as cool and awesome-looking. There’s an ice map, a fire map, a boss-only map. I really stepped up on the map environment variations since my last post on drawing Maps.

There are also variations in the environment props – like the trees/skulls/flowers/cracks/ponds that litter the map.

My latest map, Map #26 features a special Oak Tree on it. The enemy can actually pass through it and go underneath it. A simple but pretty cool effect that stands out from my normal props which usually serve as decoration and lack any sort of enemy interaction.

There are even more interactable objects on maps – like the Hadron Pulsar I mentioned briefly in my previous post, which is an ‘environment prop’ that you can repair, turning it into a turret!

I also added other unique click-able / interactable objects, thanks to my Building script I coded last week. The cool thing about the script is that it can be applied to any environmental object to make it click-able. But I don’t do it often – it’s sparsely used to preserve the uniqueness of clickable objects and also I don’t want to flood the game with junk by littering every map with these.

The map above has a skull entrance, which is set to be on top of everything else. I also drew glyphs (the white glowing characters) leading up to it.

I also have a treasure map level. This is a side-quest, more of a side-story that is optional to venture on. But if you accept the challenge, you will get a very nice reward and unlock a hidden storyline.

Loading Screen when loading maps

I spent about half a day implementing this. It was a bit technical for someone of my caliber, but I did it. I’ve displayed “loading…” popups before in IdleHeroes, but it doesn’t tell you the current loading progress.

This time, I decided to go advanced. I used an AsyncOperation to get the current loading progress and created a loading scene. As the game loads, a few things happen:

• The bar fills up left to right, and color leaps from red to green
• The creep will walk from left to right
• The background will light up (to 100% brightness at 100% progress)

The loading scene was actually unnecessary since the levels are loaded within half a second. It was so fast I had to go frame by frame to capture the two screenshots above. That’s right, the loading took 2 frames – out of 30 frames a second.

I guess the loading screen would help for those with slower computers so there’s at least feedback to say that the game has not hung, just loading. As the game gets bigger, loading times *might* increase in the future as well.

Skill Upgrades

The tutorial picture above says everything.

These are powerful skill upgrades rewarded by my Challenge feature. For many weeks the Challenge feature gave no rewards. The reason being I wanted challenges to give something special – not plain EXP or skill points, but extremely powerful stuff that you can’t get by playing the game normally – thus ‘Challenges’.

The maps of Challenges are uniquely designed to have special elements in them and special spawns. I’ve drawn unique enemies that don’t appear in the campaign mode, but appear in challenges. I sometimes think that the Challenge maps are far more interesting than campaign levels because I actually make Challenges when I have inspiration, and inspiration is a really powerful thing.

I guess the one good thing about being an independent game developer working solo is that I get to express my creativity a lot as I don’t have many restrictions. I get to inspire myself as I work and it really helps me to make better games!

More Story panels

As the campaign levels are being built, I am also developing the story in accordance to my story script which I drafted out weeks ago.

So far I like the story and enjoy drawing the story panels a lot. Sure, they take up a lot of time for something that is only on-screen for 2-3 seconds,  but visuals really tell the story.

Here are some story panels (in no particular order or sequence):

As I was drawing, I had some flashbacks to when I was drawing cutscenes for ‘Introvert’. Despite being my very first game, it had many cool cutscenes that I wish I could show to people I know.

I really enjoyed working on that game a lot, especially since it is a story-driven game and rather personal. I hope to someday release it to the public. Perhaps after I am done with this TD?

Sound Effects

For about 6 weeks, my game had been mute. No audio or music, till now.

I have begun adding the official sound effects in my game. I don’t have the money to hire a studio this time (though I might do it for the learning experience?), so I source for royalty free sounds. A lot of times when sourcing for suitable sounds, I don’t really get to find what I want exactly, so I take the closest one I can find and modify it (using Audacity).

But, there are moments when I do manage to find the exact sound I want, and I get really happy! It’s like the sound effect matches exactly what I envision my turret / object would sound like!

 

Creep Personalities?

My original intention was to use one standard death sound for all my 20+ creep types, but I learnt something from this experience of adding sounds to my game.

Sounds are just as important as music – sounds can add personality to the creep. A creep that has a human-y voice will appear more human-ish. It makes it give the vibe that it is kind, innocent, sound compassionate and almost makes you feel bad for killing it.

A creep that lets out a fantasy death sound removes the human element of it. It’s good for a non-human creature.

On the other hand, lowering the pitch or making the voice deeper makes it more ferocious. I gave this to the more evil-looking creep variations. I actually took a human-ish ‘OUCH’ sound used for a Standard Creep and modified it for one of the Corrupted creep, because the Corrupted Creep is basically a more evil-looking Standard Creep, so the sounds it makes should not be too different from a standard creep.

And finally, the sounds I used for the death of an epic boss is a very deep and long chilling death howl – to give a sense of satisfaction and to tell you that you just killed something really, really powerful, and you should feel good.

As I am sourcing for sounds, I also get a lot of inspiration. Sometimes, I hear cool sound effects that really inspire me to put them into the game and I also manage to find sounds that may not be what I am looking for, but I realize that it would be great for something else – like for a side feature or accompanying a mute animation – I go “Hey, this sounds interesting. Not what I’m looking for but it fits the ‘XXX’ really well”.

Sometimes, I also get the feeling of reverse Deja Vu – I find a sound that I know will be useful sometime in the future, so I save it anyway, just in case.

Audio Mixers

Unity gives me a lot of control over the audio I use with something called Audio Mixers. It allows me to group audio together, and I can control each group’s audio individually, or globally.

Previously, I used two audio mixers – one for BGM and one for sounds. But I combined both and instead used groups to separate them. Master, Music and Sound. Changing the Master volume changes the volume of every audio clip.

 

I have also updated my options with sliders for more flexible volume control – previously you could only mute/unmute every single soundtrack and I had no control over music vs sounds.

Options panel

 My options screen got bigger when there were more things in my game to customize – shake screen effects, camera movement were options added over time and I believe there will be more to come.

 

 

 

 

Also, a look at my taskbar:

Yep, just another average day in game development. Thank god I have three monitors and a supercomputer.

That’s All!

Every day, I am making new stuff – I code new features, I draw new art. I don’t think there ever has been a full day where I’ve never drawn a single art asset or did not have a new line of code in my game. Every day, just so much is being done. And this really makes me happy, to just do what I love and to learn at the same time. I open and close dozens of tabs every day, browsing stackoverflow, forums and googling for art inspiration. I’m going to bet there hasn’t been a day where I did not learn something new.

It is such an amazing and magical experience to be making a game and to be part of this entire process.

Oh, I also went back to school today (the Polytechnic which I graduated from 3 years ago). I still don’t know what I want to do with my life.

Going back to school was quite a nostalgic trip and prior to today, I had written a full essay on my adventures in Polytechnic, the ups and downs I have been through in those 3 years and how I was first inspired to create games. I should post that here someday… I think it might be something exciting and maybe surprising(?) to read.

I think next to developing games and drawing, writing is my second hobby. It’s probably  the reason I started this blog, so I can talk about the things I love and maybe even inspire someone out there.