Victory!

Once again we witness the power of putting your mind to something, because in contrast to the previous post, we managed to get everything in the game, working the way we'd like them to. Meaning:

Boss Battle
That's right, we have a boss battle! A terrifyingly difficult onslaught based on Da Vinci's tank design. If you have not mastered the game in the six levels foregoing this onslaught, you're in trouble. It's a merciless brawl for survival embellished with great music and a spectacular explosion to finish things off.

Power Ups:
Yup, you read it right! Power ups! We've added a way to progressively get stronger if you do a good job. We've got six types of power ups: speed up, firing rate up, health up, max health up, damage up and one up (an extra life). All of these have their own colored sphere (sprite... all still 2D, but the illusion of being 3D!) with an icon depicting what the power up will do.

Sound Effects:
We've added sound effects for power ups being dropped, power ups being picked up and also we've added reality to our huge boss explosion by giving that a sound effect too! BANG-BANG-BAAAAANG!!

Revamped AI:
AI, our focus, is a very tough subject. You have to sketch up the thinking and behaviour of the agents from the ground up! While we think it's logical to go around a wall instead of constantly bumping into it, the AI doesn't know anything about that. While we think it's logical not to fire your bullets if you're going to be caught in the blast radius, the AI doesn't know anything about that. We've had to face several of these issues and for most of them we found a great solution (for others we found passable solutions). Each type of enemy tank has their priorities. The Speed Tank will speed towards the Pudding (hence the name) and blow his way through walls to clear the path and wil fire at the Pudding if it can reach it with priority over everything else. The Power enemy will blast its way towards the player and if it is in range it will keep its distance and fire at the player from there. The Armoured Enemy has nothing to fear and will get right in the player's face just to annoy him and keep him occupied while the others take care of the rest. Because that became our primary focus as we wanted to introduce different enemy types within this enemy horde: teamwork. It's really tough to create a tactical team effort from scratch, but we managed to pull something off by giving our enemies a basic behaviour and by adding to that for each specific type we gave them roles within this horde. It's quite possible (quite likely even) that we've only scratched the surface in terms of AI, but we all feel we did a pretty good job with what we had at our disposal.

These last couple of days as everything started to fall in place we tried our best to make the game as playable as possible, so we were busy with lots of balancing. A little tweak here, some extra damage there, a longer respawn timer for him, less spawns for them... After testing and testing and looking at the little things as well as the bigger ones, we found that it takes a lot of work to find that balance of playability against the game being interesting. As we tweaked around, the game went from a slow ride to a chaotic battlefield and as we added ones and zeroes to our values, we believe we managed to create a game both playable and fun!
We're quite proud of what we accomplished and we can't wait for the symposium to add some more Pudding Protectors to our ranks!