PLAY IT HERE ON ITCH : https://jasonkinggamedev.itch.io/heart-defense (Password : Jason)
Playtesting Video :
All in all, I would say the playtest went well, and the user enjoyed. Many of the criticisms I list later were brought up, such as a lack of enemy variety. However, my playtester loved the central premise having gone through similar experiences themselves. I’m glad I was able to make that connection as that’s part of what I sought to do with this game in the first place.
Overview
Heart Defense, my fourth artwork, is the artwork I have the most passionate love and hate relationship with out of all the artworks I made. As per the assignment directions, I decided to make a game that emblematic of the experiences I had growing up and my view of growing up in general. I wanted to convey the added strain that growing up can provide as more and more responsibilities are accumulated. Even more than added strain, I wanted to convey the sacrifice inherent in growing up as it becomes more and more apparent that life, especially in this society (and this economy) doesn’t afford people the time to do everything they want to do. I think I have partially succeeded and partially failed in this goal, and overall been left with a final product that I am happy with, but not content with, and I will seek to expand this game further going forward (and hopefully I will be able to show off the updated version next semester).
Reflection – Cons :
The areas of improvement regarding Heart Defense mainly concern lacking features and content.
I wanted to add a feature where the player heart would bleed and lose health when shooting after a certain point. This is because the “bullets” you are shooting are meant to represent “time” (as in the time we use to do things) and so convey the difference between spending time as a youth (it feels free and infinite) and spending time as an adult (every second you spend doing something is a second you could spend doing something else and you’ll never get to everything and your going to die so chose wisely) I wanted the “time” (the bullets) to cost more, to cost so much more that it went from not hurting at all to hurting (which mirrors my shifting perspective regarding spending time as I aged). Coding this was easy, but without the visual feedback with the heart bleeding, it was hard to tell exactly what was happening, and I didn’t have time to implement that visual feedback.
The game needs more “enemies”. As the gameplay loop is incredibly simple, every step towards variety should be taken, including visual variety. Thus, the game needs more enemies that take your health and friendlies that heal you when shot.
The game needs better visual signalizing. As I want the game be symbolic of my experiences, I think a lack of dialogue helps, as this is something I feel not something I had expressly explained to me. However, I didn’t have time to implement clearer visual signaling for enemies being enemies or friendlies being friendlies. Additionally, the death screen should be an image representing my conceptualization of failure and how that changed as I aged, but I alas, as with the other visual signaling improvements, I did not have time to implement that.
The enemies and friendlies could use more interesting movement patterns. I’m glad I worked out how to add parabolic sine wave movement in addition to linear movement, but more variety would help the game (for example, teleporting enemies).
Reflection – Pros :
I believe the concept was executed well in terms of format and genre. The game has a very plain pixel art visual style, but I think the decision to forgo a background draws the eye even more to what really matters for this game, which is the heart and the enemies/friendlies coming to hurt/help it. I loved the opportunity to work on my pixel art skills more, and I believe this project both has good pixel art assets and allowed me to improve. I’m proud of the pixelated enemy explosion effect I created, as well as my decision to make the heart be beating the entire time. The phases of game as a concept has a very strong foundation, as currently the enemy spawns (in terms of enemies spawned and frequency) enemy movement patterns, and heart model all change phase to phase, paralleling aging. The added difficulty in conjunction with the amount of changed things from phase to phase I think conveys my message well, if not perfectly.
Conclusion :
Overall, this was definetly my favorite artwork to work on, and one I look forward to working on more in future.