Jeff PPJ06

Completed Tasks

• Playtesting!
• Sun Tower particle effects (1.5 hours)
  • Not necessarily final, but I wanted to better convey their attack and make them more visually distinctive to go along with their AoE attack, rather than having it look like a multi-target effect
• Fixed active blessing placement bug (1 hour)
  • There had been no reticule showing up for the placement of active blessings (Set unit damage and Sekhmet tower destruction). This problem has been resolved.
• Added menu functionality to correspond with tower rotation (1 hour)
  • Tower rotation prior to placement was implemented this week, so the UI had to be updated with indications that the tower could be rotated and how to do so.
• Slight health bar improvement (1 hour)
  • Made the health bar for towers generally more visible than it had been for Sun Towers and Obelisks
• Balance and Mechanics planning (2.5 hours)
  • Archer balance was considered after last week’s demo because their functionality makes them dangerous in groups since they can gang up on units. Initially, we wanted to limit the number that could engage with a single unit, but after some time attempting and testing this, it became apparent that it would not work well with the current combat system and would slow down gameplay. Instead, we plan to balance archers around the idea that they should be strong in large groups and weak individually.
• Catapult tuning (1 hour)
  • Catapult behavior was incorrect when encountering other units, as it would attempt to engage with them even though it is not supposed to. This has been fixed.
• Rewired (2 hours)
  • Worked with Javier on starting to get Rewired implemented. Good progress has been made, but much more code needs to be refactored and the game needs to be tested more with Rewired implemented to make sure everything works.
• Total time: ~10 hours

What Went Well

• Playtesting feedback has been very positive and helpful. When watching testers playing the game, it really felt like how I envisioned it, with friends sitting down together and playing, getting competitive and having a good time. This, plus the feedback we received makes me very enthusiastic about the future of the game.
• Team communication was good, standout errors and bugs were fixed promptly, and it has really begun to feel like we are moving firmly into the tuning and polish phase of development, at least for the features that will be implemented this term.
• The game is really beginning to feel like a game, now that the art has begun to roll in and feedback elements are beginning to be implemented

What Could Have Gone Better

• Like always,  more could have been accomplished, but I don’t really feel like there was much we missed.
• Ideally, we might be a little closer to proper balance at this point

Plans for Future

• Continued polish of existing elements
• Map resizing – we have come to the conclusion that the map is likely too large, so we are scaling it down to make the game more readable and less overwhelming
• Rewired