Cave Defender Devlog – Week of April 16, 2018
Since January 1st of this year, I’ve been keeping a log of my daily work on Cave Defender. I’m sharing this log on a weekly basis so you can find out how development is going with the game. In the last week I:
- Tuned game balance data in spreadsheet, then applied to game. Posted screenshot saturday.
- Reset your ‘current mission’ once you get to the end of the first playable. Made a spreadsheet with the current values for enemies and defenses. I feel like a real game designer 🙂 Next step: change those values to ones that represent the gameplay experience I want to provide, and playtest.
- Implemented a very simple save/resume system. (just tracks which level you’re on)
- Figured out that I was editing the wrong source file for the mission 2 environment mesh data. Sorted that out, then fixed all the scaling mismatching. Authored the crystal formation, and then realized it was being rendered on top of the in-world UI, so figured out how to fix that.
- Thinking about Steam Early access. Does it make sense for Cave Defender? I would need to either have a working PC control/view scheme, or working VIVE/Oculus integration. Both aren’t trivial, and my first goal is mobile VR (cardboard). Something to consider though…
- Trouble with the crystal veins in the mission 2 level. I rescaled the level geometry in Unity, so now it’s hard to match the crystals in Blender with the level…close but I think I need to do more iteration.
- Took a while, but got some decent-looking ‘crystal veins’ in the tutorial level geometry. Next up: the crystal veins for the mission 2 level geometry!
- Worked on connecting the ‘next wave countdown’ UI to the scripted event system, for mission 2. After that I worked on the ‘crystal vein’ visuals, to give more context about what the miners are doing. Had to add a way to force events to continue even if BOB-95 isn’t visible, for the spawn countdown.
Media posts this week:
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