Final Playtest and Presentation for the Till N' Kill Demo

The final play test and presentation for the Till N' Kill demo took place last Monday, the 10^th, and here are some of our takeaways from the event.

• People's enjoyment of the game increased as the number of enemies on the screen built up. This did not happen every single time because some play-testers were perfect in their understanding of the game's mechanics from the start and consistently played well throughout. We had thought of doing this before but didn't realize how much of an impact it would make until this play test. We are already working on a difficulty curve.
• The biggest smiles from play-testers occurred after triggering the tiller power-up, driving it across the screen. This moment momentarily took the player from a position of feeling overwhelmed by numbers to feeling like a powerful massacre machine. However, this doesn't happen every time because it only appears when the time/health bar is yellow. The people who were immediately good at the game never triggered it, causing the more skillful players to have somewhat decreased enjoyment yet again. We have plans to make it appear after a certain amount of game time.
• Several people attempted to slide the menu to close it, when it is programmed to close when tapped. We need to fix this minor issue by making it work under both conditions.
• Our last takeaway would probably be to bring a laptop or promotional posters for our final presentation to liven up our table, just for advertisement purposes. While I personally think that our table showed off our utmost ability for ingenuity and adaptability to the non-ideal, several people did mistake us for the homeless and try to offer us change.
  

We will be working during winter break in preparation for next semester, so hold tight for round two!

Screenshots

Pond Enemy Concept Art

The enemy ideas for the pond level will be creatures or plants found in the typical pond, so I picked a frog, a cattail, and a goose as the enemy.  We were talking about possibly adding a turtle, but we are uncertain.  Again, these are just a concept, and could change drastically.

The Mutant Frog

The Mutant Frog has a lot of eyes, so most likely the to kill him is by poke just like the mole.  Maybe a swipe down function to drown is another way to kill him. He will most likely attack with his tongue. 

The Mutant Cattail

The Mutant Cattail has the seeds become a wing-type in which it'll attack with.  The way to kill this enemy would probably be by swiping the stem and not its head.  If its head is struck, the seeds would come out either dealing more damage or causing more cattail to spawn.

The Mutant Goose

The Mutant Goose will most likely stay looking like this if we decide to use it, but its attack and spawning might be different.  We might have it fly across the screen and if you don't kill it, it will deal a tremendous amount of damage.

Animated Tractor

So Brian originally made the tractor.  He programmed it so that the tractor rolls out into place; however, the tractor seemed too plain for what we were trying to do.  I designed a new tractor that has a huge buzz saw in front that will kill all the mutants in its path.  The animation for it is very simple.  I made two frames with only slight adjustments to both.  The only real difference is the blade movement, tires, pipe, and the frame holding the blade bounces.

This is the first frame

This is the second frame