With our midpoint prototype due next week, our team got to work on adding more art assets and stitching together different elements into one cohesive game.
Custom Sprites
We needed to add some art assets for our enemies, turrets, and ammunition. I spent a while browsing through sprite sheets on free art sites, but nothing really jumped out to me. Fortunately, my search led me to Piskel, which allowed me to make my own sprite sheets.
The two aliens I made have frames that show them walking in four directions (towards, away, left, and right). To make them walk around in the game, I added a function that creates animations by mapping each walking direction to each set of frames. I added another function that mapped each animation to the directional keys, which won’t be a part of the game, but it was a nice way to test how the animation looked.
Integration
Until this week, some of the game elements like turrets and ammunition were isolated from the main branch. Now we’re really seeing it all come together. Abraham added his player-controlled tower turret that can toggle between regular bullet and flamethrower ammunition. Cliff added his enemy wave system plus title and end scenes. Nam’s turrets aren’t functioning quite yet, but soon the player will be able to buy turrets and place them on the map to automatically pick away at enemy waves.
So far this game is looking great. By next week we’ll have a working prototype with all the basic elements of a tower-defense game. After that, we’ll be able to spend our time on fun stuff like more maps, enemies, ammunition types, a more responsive UI, and sound effects.
