Welcome back to TimTim's Devlog.

This week we've been very busy with creating a playable demo of TimTim. The demo currently supports multiplayer (2 players) and is recommended to play on a controller. Now we want to share with you the biggest changes we've made to the game to showcase some of the features we implemented.

Fence System

Obviously the game needs to have an end, and the first idea we had was to have the enemies take away cows one by one (who are stashed in the center of the field), but it felt like a better idea to make the game more into a tower defense, where the fence, which keeps the cows protected, has a health bar. When this fence's health reaches 0, the game ends because the protection for the cows has been destroyed and the alien enemies have won. If this mechanic seems too boring and not unique, then we can still iterate on it to create the best experience for the player.

HUD

A very important part of any game is the HUD. It displays important information that the player needs at all times like the health of the players, current wave number... In the picture below you can see we've added the following elements:

• Both players' health bars (top corners)
• Fence health bar (bottom center)
• Current wave number (top center)
• Enemies left in current wave (top center)
• Abilities of both players (bottom corners)

It's currently just some simple placeholder images, fonts and bars, but we just wanted to get the point across of how the HUD will feel to a player, so they have the information they need.

Enemy Waves

A big part in our game is how, when and where the enemies appear and ravage the farm. We decided with the idea of waves. At the beginning of every wave a certain amount (increasing with every wave) of enemies are spawned around the map on dedicated spawn points on the outskirts of the map. When all the enemies of the current wave are defeated, the next wave will start with some time in between to let the players cool off before getting right back into action. 

I'll also mention that the enemies that are spawned have the goal of destroying the fence in the center. Whenever they are spawned, this is what they will seek towards but if the player gets too close, then he will start running towards that player and start attacking if close enough. 

This allows the player to lure the enemies away from the fence, but maybe at the cost of their own health.

The Environment

Like we've said in our last devlog, the setting will be a farm, getting attacked by aliens. For this prototype we some placeholder meshes to give you, the player, the idea of how the environment will go together will the gameplay mechanics. Our artists have been busy at work making different maps to feel what's best. We had to consider the general size of the map, because too small would mean not enough variety and it would feel claustrophobic. Too big however would feel empty and vast because there is too much, that you're scared of missing something in the map. Under here you can see two different design, one being smalled and more rounded with the other one being square and bigger.

 We are still not sure on how we want to order the layout the best, but when there are more objects we have, we can focus on planning them out into the map.

Terminals

Lastly, we want to talk about an important feature to our game: terminals. Terminals are these computers that appear around the map with which the player can interact. Each terminal gets put on a cooldown whenever used to not allow them to spam them. Currently whenever the player interacts with them (presses a button), a barrel will be spawned at a random location in the world, and the fence's health also heals for 20% of its maximum health. However, in the future we want to change this behavior so there is more of a challenge to it, but also more choices. 

So whenever the player interacts with the terminal, a window pops up with a series of controller buttons appearing. If the player presses those buttons in order, within the given time, the player can choose an effect. We currently have 4 ideas of what these effects can be:

• Charge both players' Ultimate with 50%.
• Heal the fence by 20% of its max HP.
• Temporarily shield the fence from taking any damage.
• Spawns 4 random barrels around the map.

Conclusion

That concludes this week's devlog for our game TimTim. The goal of this week was mainly to test out if our game idea would actually be fun, so we'd know if we would have to take a different route with our game. We will get feedback from other people and see if they like it to really know the potential this game has (or doesn't).

Thank you so much for once more reading up on our game, and let's get to work!