11/14-11/28: Additional Polish and Next Semester
I’ve had a lot of progress over the past two weeks. Here are my updates:
Art Integration (1 hour)
I spent some time integrating the tower upgrade art into the game. I added the upgrade art for five towers (Axe, Magic, Spear, Support, and Explosive), so the sprites change when the tower is upgraded (an example is shown above). This wasn’t too hard of a task; the main challenge was coordinating getting the sprites and converting between different file formats. This made a difference to the final product, allowing players to easily identify which towers were upgraded and which weren’t.
Bug Fixes (2 hours)
I spent a bunch of time fixing various bugs in the game. Here is a list of what I worked on:
Fixed a bug where gold text act strange if the gold was more than 10,000 (for instance, 10000 gold would read as 10,00). Surprisingly, this wasn’t a bug in the code; rather the gold text would overflow the text container, leading to a very strange display. Fixing this involved expanding the box.
Fixed a bug where the explosive damage event would go off multiple times in a single second. The explosive damage script damages multiple enemies, and the event was invoked inside the for-loop. Fixing this bug involved tracking down the loop and moving the line of code.
Fixed a bug where the tower can be dropped on a bunch of different buttons. Fixing his involved added a non-droppable rect onto the various buttons.
Fixed a bug where the back button on the difficulty select screen takes you back to the level select screen, not the mode select screen on the campaign mode. Fixing this involved adding a branch in the code that controls the main menu.
Fixed a bug where the tower screen enable button would not face in the correct direction. Fixing this involved creating a custom script to flip the button when it is pressed.
Balancing Changes (1 hour)
I made a bunch of balancing changes in response to feedback from the WolverineSoft Playtesting List. They are:
Making the Axe tower slightly less powerful (50% decrease in fire rate)
Making the Archer tower slightly more powerful (22% increase in fire rate)
Added the lead ghosts in an earlier round to ease players into the game.
Rebalanced Round 38 by increasing the time between enemies, increasing the time between waves, and reducing the number of enemies
Next Semester Planning (4 hours)
I spent a lot of time this week planning for the Winter 2022 semester studio. We' decided to start planning well in advance of the next semester in order to give ourselves more time to prepare. This is a strategy that proved itself well this semester. Because the prototype was finished well in advance of the kickoff, I was able to spend preproduction (which we define as the time between the application decisions and the studio kickoff) making experimental tools, onboarding new programmers, and creating documentation. If I had to spend that time making the prototype, my time would have been split and I would have been less productive. We’re going to replicate this strategy for the next semester.
I spent a bunch of time in meetings this week trying to plan out the details of the next iteration of the studio. Here are the things we determined:
We will be doing one project in Unity of about 25 people.
We will be doing a case study of some kind
We will bring back designers (we decided not to this semester because we believed we couldn’t give them tasks, but our lack of designers has proven to really hurt us).
We have a concrete schedule for next semester’s production
We have a list of 5 case studies to choose from for the next semester. We will be meeting with some people over the next two weeks to discuss which one we should pursue (including our friends at Arbor Iteractive)
Project Management (4 hours)
lot of my time was spent on managing the programmers and the project. These responsibilities include:
Make JIRA tasks for programmers and designers based on playtesting feedback. Many programmers said my method of making tasks with a HELPFUL LINKS section and a POSSIBLE IMPLEMENTATION section assisted them in their task (this is blatantly inspired by Austin Yarger’s teaching techniques, I’m sure he won’t mind). Upon further questioning, students said this helped reduce the time they spent lost in the codebase. I created their tasks with these sections (at least where applicable).
Reviewing and merging pull requests. There was only one merge conflict and 20 pull requests, which wasn’t too hard to merge in.
Checking in with members and assisting them with implementation. This mainly involves answering their questions about how the code works and directing them to the relevant parts of the codebase. Overall, it seems that students find the codebase easy to navigate, especially with the HELPFUL LINKS section of the JIRA tasks (it also helps that the codebase isn’t that big, I’d estimate around 5k lines of original code)