Holes to Hell - Road to 1.0

It is done!

This is the first time we have followed through and finished a game jam project. For the last few months we have been chipping away at the task of finishing up the game and adding more content to make the game a fun experience for at least a few minutes. In the last week we took a final sprint to completion and honestly, the weekend felt like a second game jam in itself.

Compared to the game-jam version, a lot of things are new, so we want to list off a few of them:

• We created 4 new enemies and reworked the previously existing 3, bringing the total up to 7 enemies.
• We created 4 bosses to give each level a spicy last wave. Each boss has a special ability, "Stunning towers", "Healing Enemies", "Mining under towers" and  "Summoning support in the form of skeletons".
• We added a way to speed up or slow down the game, so everyone can play at their own pace or "skip" the waves that are not challenging anymore.
• We added ditches filled with water, allowing more variety in the maps and gameplay
• We added a tower info system, allowing players to see information about placed towers like bought upgrades, stats and giving the player some control over which enemies each specific tower should target
• We added a retry button to the pause menu and the game over screen
• We added a tutorial
• We deleted the 2 existing levels and replaced them with 6 new ones, one of which is a tutorial the game didn't previously have.
• We spent a lot (really a lot) of time, trying to balance the enemies, towers, bosses and especially trying to create challenging but not frustrating waves for all the levels
• We had to rework the endless mode, since all enemies were changed, and we really didn't like the old system, which we built in the last hours of the jam

Smaller additions / changes include:

• changes to the UI and menus, but especially the background of the main menu, which took way too long
• rework of the tower stats and balancing
• visualizing the range of towers
• fixed and changed the upgrades, since none of them have been working correctly (which no one including us noticed)
• gave the flamethrower penguin a little gas mask because TF2 I guess
• fiddled with the tower-placement-system a lot
• a few particles here and there

Things we had to push forward / cut:

• Music and Sound (This is a big one. We only have a few sounds from the game jam and most of them we didn't make ourselves like usually. But especially sound is something which we want to come back to at some point)
• A level editor for creating maps and waves
• An in-game encyclopedia with all possible information about towers, enemies, bosses and upgrades
  
• Special game rules / effects that can be applied to certain levels
  
• Mobile-friendly input and publishing the game for Android
  

Who knows, maybe at some point we'll have the motivation to spend another few months implementing all of that. For now, we are concentrating on working on another project and participating in some additional game-jams.

Have a good one ;)