Cave Defender Devlog – Week of December 3, 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:
- Ongoing design issues:
- How to communicate when you have enough resources to build something
- How to communicate why you are accumulating said resources
- How to provide interesting choices and tradeoffs for defense selection
- How to communicate when a wave will start
- How to communicate when a wave is complete
- How to communicate how far through a mission you are
- How to communicate if you barely got by or did really well
- How to communicate that things are not going well, when there is still enough time to turn it around
Thinking about:
- You earn a base amount of resources, but can build other collectors to earn more (need to visualize this so it’s very clear)
- Maybe you need to fulfill a certain quota for mining to complete the mission, so you accumulate one type of resource for building defenses, and another is towards the mission quota
- So building additional collectors is a risk of not defending but getting more resources and meeting the mission quota sooner
- This could mean that you never reach some waves, but that’s fine
- UI revamp to make it very clear if you have enough resources to build defenses or not
- Post-mission review of defenses lost?
So...game design thinking work for today.
- More converting things to use resonance audio, figuring out that you have to spatialize audio for it to play at all in resonance, so music and other non-spatialized audio sources shouldn’t use the resonance audio mixer.
- Converted the main menu and tutorial scenes to resonance audio.
- Confirmed that the GoogleVR audio I was using has a crash bug on iOS, must be because it’s deprecated and I’m using newer Unity - resonance audio works, so now I have to go through and fix everything up to use that instead, and then remove the GoogleVR audio stuff completely. And test on iOS and then Android. Posted on social media.
- Still debugging the crash, turns out it is GoogleVR audio related, I’m guessing either I really have to update to ‘resonance audio’, or there is a hidden fix since I’m using the GoogleVR SDK from March. It’s pretty frustrating that the GoogleVR library continues to rename things - this is a big hassle for people using your library, just FYI!
- Made an iOS build to actually fix the audio bug. Encountered a new crash. Rebuilt some lighting in case that is related (lighting data version is incompatible)
- Fixed the bug that was uncovered yesterday - it was related to me trying to debug an issue but not seeing it through at the time.
Media posts this week:
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