Ahhh it’s been quite a lot of effort, and a lot of hours, but the game prototype is done! Not sure how I thought I’d be able to get it all done yesterday, I barely even finished today.

The final additions to the prototype that were implemented today were:

• Add the ability to use all special abilities on the puzzle board.

  

  To explain the abilities in the order you see them:
  Ice: Freezes a tile, making it unable to match whilst remaining frozen.
  Fire: Thaws a frozen tile, bringing it back intot he game. Destroys a tile if used on a non frozen tile.
  Barrage: Deal 50% damage to tiles in a 3 x 3 grid.
  Poison: Chooses 3 tiles of the type selected and removes them from the game.
  Assassin: Swap the selected tile with a randomly selected tile (I was lucky in the gif!)

• Implement the enemy buff effects when matching enemy debuff tiles.

  

  These are not very obvious for the player, but that will be developed in future builds. This example shows the matching of an “orc” tile spawned a “boss unit” for the enemies! The enemy buff is selected at random, and can: increase the damage of enemies in a lane; increase the movement speed of enemies in a lane; disable the turret for some time; spawn a group of 5 grunts in a lane.

• Implement a basic leveling up system that allows you to ugprade your base.

  

  Levelling up was an important part for allowing player to get stronger as the game got more difficult. A quick implementation encapsulates the majority of what I want from a levelling up system. You get to a points threshold, an upgrade button appears that you can upgrade when you have a spare few seconds. You can upgrade your turret / base, or waste an upgrade if you’re in dire need of a huge heal!

Finally, a game over screen was implemented - a simple process which displays a panel when your base health reaches 0, The panel gives the player the option to restart the game, I decided the game shouldn’t be paused during this, so that the orcs continue to attack on the game over screen :D

A build was made for android to have a quick play test on. It is now time start assessing where I want to go with project, and gauge if the game mechanics are fun and/or if extra important mechanics need to be updated. I was so pleased how well it played on mobile considering I had done zero of my development-time testing on mobile. Will fix one or two little things and let a few people play and give feedback before I move to the next phase of development - reassessing the game design.