Alien Army Creator- Week beginning 18th October 2021

On Thursday we were assigned into groups of three and tasked with creating a cookie clicker. My group and I brainstormed some ideas and decided on an alien invasion cookie clicker where the task was to have as many aliens as possible invade. We then selected our roles with the other guys being happy to code and one of them happy to take on art as well. I decided to take on design and help with the artwork and the user interface.

I started on Friday buy creating 4 images that show what each screen, start menu, pause menu, game screen and store screen need to display. I also drew incredibly rough backgrounds so that the team can gather an idea of the theme for the game with most of the backgrounds involving space. I then also made sure we had pause buttons, store buttons, and quit buttons on the screen. Finally, I began to write out and explain the upgrades and how they would be purchased. I offered the idea of an auto clicker, clicks inputted doubling and the auto clicker inputs doubling. The first upgrade, the auto clicker, is a one-time purchase and cannot be purchased again, however the other purchases can be bought multiple times as they double the current clickers value, however the price will also increase as the value of the clicks increases. The purchase price of these items will be the number of aliens that have invaded. The purchase amount will then be taken away from the total clicks and the player then must rebuild them.

Also, on Friday I created backgrounds that could be used for the game. I did this by sourcing a collection of images and organising them into power point. I only had to create 2 backgrounds as 3 screens require the same one. They’re not the best but the focuses aren’t necessarily on that, but the team is more than welcome to create better backgrounds and simply use these ones as an example of how we need it to look.

The team did decide to use the backgrounds I had created. I then found and edited the image of the Martian so that it didn’t have a background and then also created little logos for the pause and store buttons. I created the store ne by finding a basket png and placing it onto a white background in photo shop and created the pause button by writing two ll in black font on a white background in photo shop.

I left Mikey to do the coding, conversing every day to check progress and Marwa also popped up a little later in the week to add some more art features like the button. The guys also added a mechanic of invading and destroying a planet which was cool but unfortunately this would reset the alien invader counter. The only other annoying thing was the prices of each upgrade. Unfortunately, it did not increase when the price would so was confusing when you wanted to upgrade after multiple times but if we had longer this is something we would have worked on.

We did have some issues with uploading, Mikey was very confused, so I googled it and we worked through the solution to the problem together. I also forgot that we needed to create a 60 second video that featured game play so very very very early in the morning I made a 60 second video that acted as a mini trailer with voice over and game play.

Play the game here---> https://michael-up2057946.itch.io/alien-army-creator