Cave Defender Devlog – Week of April 2, 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:

• Posted screenshot saturday. Worked on timing of BOB-95 dialog and movement during mission 2.
• While on a Greyhound bus, fixed the scripting system so a wave completes when all enemies have been destroyed (instead of just all spawned).
• Updated the tutorial scene to support the multiple spawn points. Added basic ‘text screens’ for the beta build, just to inform players it is a beta build, when I skip some of the eventual content, and at the end.
• Missed the submission deadline for Siggraph 2018 VR projects. Darn! It was last night. Quickly added support for multiple spawn points per lane. Need to update the tutorial with the new format.
• Posted social media for today - announced the name of the ship AI. More second briefing timing fixes.
• Realized that I had a mix of fonts used in the game - and none of them are the one I settled on for the logo. So did a pass and updated all the fonts. That resized some text dialog so I had to re-time a few things. Looks much better!
• What’s left for the first playable? Everything needs an audio pass for sure. Also need to do lots of on-device testing. Non-VR menu -> Beta scene -> Calibration scene -> Tutorial -> First Briefing -> Mission 2 -> Second Briefing -> Outro scene. Beta and outro scenes don’t exist yet. The second briefing could use more assets, but I wonder if it really matters for this milestone. Mission 2 needs tuning for balance for sure. With that, I think this milestone would be complete and I could get testing going.
• I’ve decided the ship’s AI will be called COI - Corporate On-board Intelligence. Apparently it’s a rare first name that seems to be applicable to boys and girls. But this is an AI so it’s just an acronym.
• Threw together some holograms (mostly existing ones, so just timing values) for the second briefing.
• Added BOB-95 to the second briefing scenario. Added all the dialog I wrote for the second briefing.

Media posts this week:

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