Cave Defender Devlog – Week of December 10, 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:
- Talked through the latest design decisions with Olya, including the idea of additional miner/batteries that could become targets (as a risk) with the benefit of generating additional resources.
- Continued with thoughts from yesterday, the shield units would need to include some sort of beacon that mimics whatever signal the miners/batteries give off, in order to attract the debris. I might need to redesign the shield units for a third time then, in order to properly communicate that. Also the other two defense types (laser cannon and tractor beam variants) will not get directly targeted, but will have to slow down and destroy incoming debris before it hits the target. There will be other types of debris that will do other kinds of damage, maybe even ones that ignore shield units altogether? Currently I have the concept of ‘debris clouds’ that are not targetable, but shield units can stop them. Maybe they should cause no damage to shield units, just a constant minor threat to make sure you have at least one built.
- Thought about failure conditions. In other tower defenses, you have ‘enemies’ that approach, and cause damage to your defenses. If they are successful, they will continue destroying defenses until they get to whatever you are protecting (or escape in the case of tower defense games that have that as a failure case). If all the ‘enemies’ are space debris that essentially crash into things - that’s a one shot situation. How could they continue? Does this even matter? One reason why it might matter is that the space debris will have to ‘target’ the nearest defense, for its trajectory. Then defenses (or anything you can build) has the value of absorbing the full attack of at least one ‘enemy’. Maybe I can balance around this rather than trying to directly solve it? There will have to be enough incoming debris to threaten what is to be protected as well. Or perhaps shield units could serve as beacons for debris? So they function as being able to absorb punishment as well as being targeted.
- Tested the tutorial in the iOS build again. Teleporter fly-in audio didn’t work or was too quiet, but finally the second defense ‘warp-in’ sound worked! Fixed it. Also BOB-95 is looking at the defense while it flies in - timing is off. But I’m going to redo all of that so I’m leaving it for now.
- Tested the iOS build, no more crashing, but the ‘teleport in defenses’ audio isn’t working. Also not working in the editor. Fixed it, and confirmed it in the endless level on iOS. Need to test the tutorial again since that was the original problem that kicked off this entire thing.
- Updated all the prefabs. There were more than I expected. Deleted the last of the Google VR audio stuff.
- Audited all scenes for GvrAudio components. Need to update all the prefabs now.
No media posts this week.
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