Potato Apocalypse
A revolution in the gaming industry. A shockingly brave piece of electronic entertainment gauranteed to impress and amaze. The new standard for all things video games. This is: Potato Apocalypse.
Project maintained by Natsirt87 Hosted on GitHub Pages — Theme by mattgraham
Description
Potato Apocalypse is a planet defense game. The player controls a spaceship and uses its loadout of three different weapons to defend the central planet from spud invaders. The game draws influence from the retro arcade game, Asteroids. A primary goal of the game is to create an engaging and rewarding game experience through minimal design. As soon as the player enters the game, they should be able to intuitively understand the goal and immediately be able to dive into the gameplay. The game uses purely physics-based movement for the player and enemies. The enemies attempt to thwart the efforts of the player by shooting projectiles that disrupt the position of the player’s spaceship.
Development Log
See our development log here.
Play the Game
You can play the WebGL build of the game here.
Playtesting Reports
Alpha Playtest
This was the first major playtest for the game, which was done internally among the students of the class. We learned a lot from the feedback, particularly in regards to what we indicate to the player and ideas for different weapons & mechanics.
You can see the feedback here
Beta Playtest
Unfortunately over half of our team was sick during the Beta Playtest, so we were unable to participate. As such, we did not get any written feedback from other students during this stage of development. However, we did have various other people play the game informally and their feedback did positively impact how the game was developed. They particularly had feedback about the balance of the fry and mashed potato enemy, as well as their functionality and abilities.
Final Playtest
For this playtest we created our own feedback form, which was more detailed than the ones we previously used, and had other students and friends play the game and give feedback. We got generally very positive responses, but still useful criticism regarding mainly user experience and learning curve.
You can see the feedback here
Credits
Tristan Commons: Lead Gameplay Programmer
Veronika Bykova: Gameplay & UX Programmer
Chanhee Park: UI/UX Engineer
Tyler Schmale: Technical Artist
References
The projectiles for the game were obtained from here: https://opengameart.org/content/assets-free-laser-bullets-pack-2020
The explosion animation was obtained from here: https://opengameart.org/content/explosion
And the planet health bar UI was obtained from here: https://github.com/Brackeys/Health-Bar
Trailer
The trailer for the game is viewable here.
Screenshots
Presentations
Postmortem presentation on 5 things that went right and 5 things that went wrong for the development of the game.
Game presentation about the final state of the game.
Team Reflection
The one thing we did really well was communication, and members worked on the project by helping each other effectively for more optimization and better outputs. The evidence can be the Trello tracking progress and our discord group chat. By dividing tasks, we could collaborate on more functions and issues for both high and low priorities.
If we had another 2 weeks to work more on the game, the 3 highest priority items would be adding more enemy types, adding more weapons and their progression, and shooting mechanics. These are the main essentials of our game, and it would be great to keep improving them.