Hello!
At the end of the last devlog, I discussed my thoughts surrounding the future of this project. As of now, I will continue on with the Nerf theme and work towards shipping the 0.1.0 game build. I'm currently working on commissioning some basic art assets for some minor polish. Every game does need artwork. I am still deciding what I will do for audio and animations.
Now, on to the cool stuff I've been working on.
In the last devlog, I talked about dynamically scaling the amount of enemies per wave and balancing out the weapon and ammo costs. I have started work on the latter, by building an "Excel" (Google Sheets is better) workbook. It's not pretty, but it is fully functional:
The Ammo Data section stores the cost and quantity data of the ammo the player can purchase. The Static Game Data section contains the enemy's static HP and score values, alongside the Wave Number value, which is used for in simulating in the Wave Data section. The remaining sections are self-explanatory.
How the Wave Data section works is by taking in data from all but Weapon Cost Formulas to simulate: the total score/income for the player, the HP sum of all enemies in the wave (minimum shots to complete) and the cost per wave depending on what the Active Ammo is. The Ammo Formulas inherits from Ammo Data to run it's calculations, which are then used in Wave Data.
The simulation capability of this sheet is technically infinite. You can set the Wave Number to any positive integer within reason, and the rest of the sheet will calculate and update accordingly. This will allow me to plot the data for any given range of waves, which I then can use to balance out the Weapon Cost Formula and Ammo Formulas. Math is awesome, the numbers don't lie.
In another sheet, I'm plotting the individual enemy type data. From the discussions I've had with various folks, it's been noted that from a design prospective, hard coding enemies to only be able to take damage from a specific ammo type is takes away from the gameplay experience. Instead, if enemies only take full damage if they are hit by the proper ammo type, and half otherwise, this gives the player a backup option and re-frames how the view the original mechanic. See the Rested XP mechanic in WoW for an example of this, Extra Credits covers that in one of their videos.
Continuing with game design, it was recommended to me balance out the total income of the player per wave so that they spend the majority of their points on ammo, plus a margin, so they can survive the next wave and save up to buy new blasters. This approach for economy balancing is a great baseline, and another recommendation was to balance in such a way that the total income for any given wave is enough to survive the next wave and purchase a weapon, plus a margin, and then reset the player's score. This way, the player is incentivized to plan ahead and make the most of what they have, while still allowing them semi-guaranteed progression. I intend to try both the former and latter approaches.
Now that I've become quite familiar with code and have built plus refined the majority of game mechanics, nice to be able to dive deep into actual game design. Alongside this, I've been working on adding the finite state machine to my Enemy Controller script. I'll cover that once it's refined. I may go back to sharing various interesting snippets of code, I think that adds more flavor to these logs.
Going forward, I'm going to continue working on balancing and refining in preparation for the 0.1.0 build. Hopefully, in the next devlog, I'll be able to go over the situation regarding artwork, audio, and animations. Those are important parts of this game too, which is something I've only come to realize now that I've fleshed out the underlying mechanics.
In regards to my IRL work, it's still going very well. I am now an industrial electrician apprentice, and I'm being taught new skills while still cutting thousands of feet of cable. Production is ramping up, which means my work days will become even more busy and there will be plenty of over time available. I'm very grateful to be where I'm at in life and in my career, the trend going forward is exponential growth.
Thanks for reading!
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