SaED Week 10: Reflection

17/05/21

Comparison to Week 1

My goal from the very beginning was to produce a Tower Defence game that is balanced in such a way that it challenges players, yet still remains fun to play and to experiment with. I feel that I have accomplished this goal successfully, according to the praise I received from my testers last week. Obtaining feedback from my testers has made me feel more confident in my ability to balance something successfully and to implement the precious and positive feedback loop that these games need in order to be satisfying and replayable. The methodology that I chose for my research was extremely vital in helping me obtain insightful and relevant feedback and the game would not be as well balanced and fun to play, if I had not used these methodological techniques. The towers and creeps that I incorporated into the game are enjoyable for players to use and fight against. Even though I excluded certain towers and creeps from the game, I am glad that they were at least experimented with, and those that remained in the game feel polished, yet simple, and their inclusion is justified. I would personally like to thank my two amazing testers for all the feedback that they provided to me. They were extremely patient with my decision-making and throughout the development stages, and the ideas that they suggested helped me to create a much more improved game overall. Their feedback made me realise what was important when balancing a game and my observation of their positive facial expressions, when the final test session ended, made me feel confident in my abilities.

Scope

If I was to take this project further and implement more creeps, towers and even map layouts, I would like to incorporate everything that I observed and learned about throughout this module. I want to experiment more with map layouts and discover if a change in both scenery and design would work well with everything that I have balanced in accordance with the default map for this project. I also have many new ideas for towers and creeps that I thought about as a result of the testing phases. If I was given more time, I would have considered more ideas for these mechanics that may have helped make the overall curve of difficulty even smoother.

Since this was the first time that I used spreadsheets for a major part of a project, I anticipate that the skills that I developed will continue to improve as I have learned, through research and first-hand experience, how important these tools are when balancing a game.

Conclusion

In conclusion, I am very pleased with how the project turned out. I wish I had more time to polish certain mechanics, but I think I was able to achieve everything I set out to initially do. The valuable feedback provided by my testers is something I will consider carefully, when I decide, possibly, to create projects in the same vein. The ideas and elements that I learned about, from balancing a game like this, will help strengthen my overall designer skills in the future. Through the trials and tribulations of observing my testers play the game that I balanced, I feel more of an incentive to balance games in a polished and entertaining way in the future. With each session, the looks of frustration on my testers’ faces dwindled and by the end of them, there was nothing but joy and satisfaction. This experience has incentivised me to make any future games as balanced as this one.