Ahhh it’s been quite a lot of effort, and a lot of hours, but the game prototype is done! Not sure how I thought I’d be able to get it all done yesterday, I barely even finished today.

The final additions to the prototype that were implemented today were:

• Add the ability to use all special abilities on the puzzle board.

• To explain the abilities in the order you see them:
  Ice: Freezes a tile, making it unable to match whilst remaining frozen.
  Fire: Thaws a frozen tile, bringing it back intot he game. Destroys a tile if used on a non frozen tile.
  Barrage: Deal 50% damage to tiles in a 3 x 3 grid.
  Poison: Chooses 3 tiles of the type selected and removes them from the game.
  Assassin: Swap the selected tile with a randomly selected tile (I was lucky in the gif!)

• Implement the enemy buff effects when matching enemy debuff tiles.

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These are not very obvious for the player, but that will be developed in future builds. This example shows the matching of an "orc" tile spawned a "boss unit" for the enemies! The enemy buff is selected at random, and can: increase the damage of enemies in a lane; increase the movement speed of enemies in a lane; disable the turret for some time; spawn a group of 5 grunts in a lane.

• Implement a basic leveling up system that allows you to ugprade your base.

Levelling up was an important part for allowing player to get stronger as the game got more difficult. A quick implementation encapsulates the majority of what I want from a levelling up system. You get to a points threshold, an upgrade button appears that you can upgrade when you have a spare few seconds. You can upgrade your turret / base, or waste an upgrade if you’re in dire need of a huge heal!

Finally, a game over screen was implemented - a simple process which displays a panel when your base health reaches 0, The panel gives the player the option to restart the game, I decided the game shouldn’t be paused during this, so that the orcs continue to attack on the game over screen :D

A build was made for android to have a quick play test on. It is now time start assessing where I want to go with project, and gauge if the game mechanics are fun and/or if extra important mechanics need to be updated. I was so pleased how well it played on mobile considering I had done zero of my development-time testing on mobile. Will fix one or two little things and let a few people play and give feedback before I move to the next phase of development - reassessing the game design.