Update 1 and postjam thoughts.

I'm a little late but life kinda got in the way. I've got lots to say and this post will just be me rambling about my thoughts. If you just want to see the changelogs for the new update. You can safely scroll down.

Recently, the game zanga game jam finally ended its voting period and the winners were announced. Although I'm fairly sure that the "voted by the audience" category was botted, the other winners were all picked by judges and I give my sincere congratulations to those winners. While I wouldn't say the top 1 game was my favourite it was definitely one of the better games and they deserve the reward they got.

I am a little salty though, that my game didn't get featured on the game zanga results video as an honourable mention, but alas, it is what it is.

I came into this jam a little burned out from participating from another jam just a few weeks earlier, for which the game i made wasn't very satisfactory to me, so I was a little motivated and questioned *if* i could even make a worthy game. But this jam ended up with me developing my proudest work I've worked on so far.

So where even did the idea for this game come from? Some people might be confused on who Yuuka even is? Why are there yin yangs and ufos? Well, to put it shortly, she's from a game series called the touhou project, and that franchise has very lax rules on fans developing fangames for it. Yuuka is a character heavily associated with plants, so i thought, why not make a touhou fangame for this plant jam featuring Yuuka? The enemies are all ones who appear in the touhou games. As for the gameplay itself, a lot of inspiration might obviously be seen to be taken from plants vs zombies. But another more subtle inspiration in its design is actually vampire survivors. This is the reason why you control a character that participates in the defense, pick up the coins from the dead enemies, and why you can upgrade your character. There isn't any other particular Tower Defense game that there are inspirations from, since believe it or not, i don't actually play them a whole lot. But it's been fun developing this regardless. Also, this type of game was fairly quick to be made since I had a lot of code from an earlier project for a shooter game and enemy pathing, so that made the process a whole lot faster since more time could be given for the tower defence aspect and the level design itself. Although, by the end of the submission period, the last level was really just made by copying the previous level's enemies and changing them around a bit and adding more enemies. Making Levels might have honestly been the biggest challenge for this game, even harder than the programming itself.

MY Thanks:

Very huge, huge thanks to Iced lemon for offering his help in developing this game. I posted updates of me working on the game in a gamedev discord server and he liked the idea of the game well enough to, not only offer his thoughts on it, but also draw most of the sprites for the game itself. And on top of that, he helped in programming the enemies and flowers to have the little squish and hovering animations that they have. His thoughts on the game itself were also invaluable to give the game more of a direction and focus, and it wouldn't be what it is without his help.

Also thanks to my friend Morsch for letting me use his music for the game. Please check out his youtube channel since he makes banger music.

The future:

So, what was I doing in the past few weeks during the jam voting period? Well, most of my time was taken by University, Ramadhan, and taking care of my cats, so I didn't have as much free time as i'd have liked to work on the game, i did use whatever free time i had for it though, and just today was able to make the final touches for the update to finally have a public release.

What's for the future? I will be taking a little break from the game now, as I'll be participating in another gamejam this weekend. Depending on what I'm able to make in that jam, I might give the focus on updating that game afterwards, atleast until it reaches a satisfactory state if i dont find whatever i could muster up for the jam itself to not be so. 

Rest assured though, that I'm definitely planning on updating this game to its completion. I don't like leaving my projects unfinished and this has been one of the most important ones for me so far. I'll be taking a little break though for eid and stuff, and to focus more on university.

Changelogs:

So what changed in this new update? Well, a lot. Since level design takes such a long time, and IcedLemon was fairly busy recently so he couldnt make new art assets, I focused more on polishing up the mechanics themselves and rebalancing the existing levels, rather than adding new levels (with one exception). So there are still the same 7 levels, but they are vastly different now.

The changes:

Upgrade overhaul. Since the upgrades cost the same currency as the flowers, they kinda clashed with them in what the player would want to buy. Also, trying to balance the costs of each so there would be an incentive to both pay for the flowers OR pay for the upgrades with the same value was a nightmare. So instead, upgrades are now free! But you only get 1 upgrade every few levels. This means that you only get 2 (or 3 i forgot) upgrades by the end of the game. But they are all free, so you can focus using your money on the plants themselves.

Flower rotations. Did you think the entire flower being rotated looked weird? Me too. So now, when rotating flowers, there is a little indicator of the direction of its shot that gets rotated instead of the whole flower itself. Makes stuff look a lot more natural.

Tulip change. The tulip got a new function. It now has a radius where it shoots the closest enemy within that radius, rather than just be a reskinned poppy.

You can now cancel a flower after you buy it.

Shovel mechanic. When placing flowers at the start of a level, you can also move existing flowers or even sell them using a shovel. They will be sold at 50% their original price though so be careful.

New tier of enemies: Green enemies. Their power is between blue and purple enemies.

Enemy rebalances. All enemies now have a lot more health. This should hopefully make the game a bit more challenging, while also letting the levels not have to spam 40 enemies just to have the semblance of a challenge as it did before. Should also help in not inflating the amount of money you get in later levels from said spamming of enemies. Different Fairy tiers now also shoot different patterns of bullets.

Enemies that get hit are flashed now.

Some sound effects were added. Like the end of the level, and the tree being hurt. 

Levels now indicate when new lanes are added. The start of level menu now tells you that new lanes are added so you no longer get confused about it.

Fixed some bugs. The biggest one was the game being locked in the first level after restarting.

FInally, an endless mode.

There is now an endless mode that has the enemies spawn infinitely to see how long you can survive. There is a new map for it, and it is the only map for it atm. Also, you can plant flowers during the defence in this mode by pressing F. I hope this addition will be exciting for people to play. You can't get upgrades for yuuka in this mode yet though.

Plans for the future.

Well, obviously more maps is obvious. Also rebalancings. But more than that. I hope to change the title screen so it has something that isn't a free asset. In addition to having music for it. Endless mode also needs some things. i hope to add the ability to somehow get upgrades for it.

I hope to also add bosses to this game. Have some kind of climactic battles to it yknow? 

Some difficulty options as well. Some ideas for it for example are: Death for yuuka ends the game just as death for the tree does. Being unable to place flowers on the enemy paths. And some more.

There are also a lot of minor quality of life features that i hope to add.

Some more pickups other than money. Like a healing pickup or a bomb that clears the enemies around you.

Perhaps some new flower types and upgrades as well?

Conclusion

There are a lot of things I can add for this game since it has so much potential. If you have any ideas that could work for it as well, please comment them. I'd really love to know. Any general feedback would also be appreciated. 

If you read all of this, thank you a lot. I hope it wasn't too incomprehensible since i'm too tired to spellcheck it or edit it and whatever. I probably spent like 30 minutes writing this at 1 am lol. Well, I don't know how to end this. 

Good day to you fair reader and fair well.