Making the Game: Progress Update, Interface Changes

In today's Making the Game entry, I'll be giving an update on current development progress, and talking a bit about some changes and additions to the game interface.

When Can We Play?
Alpha testing is soon... hopefully.  I'm making progress when I am able to work on the game, and there really isn't much ground left to cover in terms of designing the game objects.  After I get the rest of the basic interactions working properly it's really only a matter of adding in some tower abilities, finding some suitable icons or artwork for the enemies, and tweaking the various aspects of the overall gameplay.  Here's a preview of what the interface looks like now:

It looks a bit different from the last iteration (I forgot to include a display for "Lives" last time, among other things), and I feel a lot better about it.

The biggest interface change noticeable from this screenshot is the frame off to the side of the main window.  This sidebar will pop out whenever a tower on the game field is selected, providing the player with tower-specific data such as its level, range, damage, firing speed, and special ability if it has one (this is just a basic cannon tower, so it only has one role: damage!).  In addition to this information, buttons for tower actions are also shown.  At the bottom, there will always be an option to sell the tower, which will remove it from the game field and refund an amount of gold back to the player.  If the tower can be upgraded, a button will appear with the icon of the next-level tower to be upgraded to.  Aside from clicking these buttons, the player can also hit a hotkey ('x' to sell, 'u' to upgrade) while the sidebar is shown to perform these actions.

Another change visible in the preview is the range indicator.  The same graphic as the in-game AoE targetting circle, the image feels like it works well here and doesn't obstruct much of the viewable game area.

One other big interface addition comes in the form of informative tooltips, which aren't shown in the screenshot.  Every button in the game that corresponds to a tower, blessing, or action will have a tooltip that is shown when the player moves their cursor over it, clarifying what the item or action is.

What's a Blessing?
I realized after I posted last week's entry that I didn't give any sort of explanation after the preview screenshot.  The blessing system is the method of elemental development for the game, and it uses essence as its resource instead of gold.  For every enemy kill the player will earn an amount of essence, which can then be offered to the gods in return for their blessing.  Each blessing corresponds to an element, and will grant the ability to build towers that utilize them.  Also, multiple levels of each blessing will be available, and will be required to build further levels of their elemental towers.  Hopefully this will allow for a bit of early-/mid-game specialization, until late-game when the player will be able to afford all of the blessings.  This should also present the possibility of more powerful, multi-element towers down the road.

Gimme the Code!
The source for the game is rough at best right now, so until I can clean it up a bit I will have to delay posting an update to WoWInterface.  For those interested in some of the game programming involved, in my next post I will cover a handful of things from the game itself, and try to include a bit of code as well.

Most of the basic game elements are present already, and I am content with most of them.  Next up on my list of things to do is to flesh out some more tower abilities (right now all they really know how to do is shoot their main attack), and find or make some decent images to use for the enemies.  Toggle-able health bars might be a good thing, too.


I'll keep this post short and to-the-point, and next time I will go into some detail regarding the programming side of development.  Thanks for all of the interest and comments so far, and hopefully soon we'll have yet another shiny thing to distract us during raid time.