CAGD 377 - Blog Post 6 - 11/24/2024

This sprint was probably the most productive for the whole group and it is cool how much the game has changed in one sprint. Personally, this one was all about getting our upgrade system up and running as this is one of the main features that will be setting us apart from other swipe and merge games. This system was a little different in all of our minds. Hence, it was a little difficult trying to find a starting point as everyone wanted it to function differently, so keeping everyone happy while also making sure it made sense and worked properly. At first, we were going to subtract from your score, but the designer wanted it to be a different resource called brains and not have it overlap with the score. What he wanted was for the brains to go up when you merge but have it been 50% of what you would get for score and then you would use this to have the blocks spawn in with a higher number on them. Ultimately what I did to keep it a little simpler for the players is I made it so they get one brain every time they merge, and they need a certain number of brains, it is set to 25 but it might go up to balance the game out more, to upgrade the new spawning blocks.

Another thing that I did was make it so the horde on screen would visually grow as you upgrade so that you can see that you are getting stronger. The lead started this at the end of the last sprint but whatever he had conflicted with the way the designer and I’s projects were set up as it would break when we tried to use his script but would work perfectly fine for him. He ended up just abandoning it and passed it over to me as he started on something much more difficult but just as important. After I looked at it some more, I was able to figure out the problem and fix it for us, now every time you go to upgrade your horde will also grow. We are hoping this gives the players a sense of growth when they use the upgrade feature.

        Something else that I did was add some sort of visual feedback to the city for when you are attacking as players were getting confused when they would start an attack. How they were confused as they would tap on the attack button and the horde would move over but then there would be a few second breaks before the attack started and then they would get bored during the attack, so what I did was lower the amount of time before the attack then I put a particle effect on the city to show it burning and that you were doing damage.

Lastly, during the sprint, I ended up doing the work too little for it to be given a card but was a definite quality of life change for the game. I went through and added a number to the blocks so that players know the value of them and not just the color. We kept getting feedback from play testers that they knew the blocks were increasing and that they had to match the colors, but they were unsure of what the colors meant so we decided to give them a visual number so that players could more easily know what the blocks were for. I also asked my team if we would want to switch the blocks out for visual models of the zombies but still have a color and number attached to them, all that would change is the fact that they are no longer blocks rather they are zombie models, but my team said that their play testers think that it would be too much and that they liked the blocks.