I’m chipping away at the remaining bug fixes and balancing tasks. My free time has dropped significantly over the past couple of months, slowing the pace of progress. There is one upside to the time constraint: I’m saying “no” to scope creep more often.
- Bug fixes.
- Bandit outposts stopped generating. I had to re-familiarize myself with the history generation design tools and code, both of which are extremely complicated. I think I ended up writing a debug log statement for every line of code in some of the history generation methods. I spent so much time troubleshooting this issue, which is especially frustrating given my recent time limitations. I made the history generator much too complex, and the game hardly uses it currently (it’s a big time investment to fully configure the generator; I removed it from the demo scope). The complexity stems from building a highly flexible configuration tool in Unity for creating history event types. I likely could’ve gotten away with a simpler version.
- Fixed minor bugs in combining items and map generation.
The remaining tasks for the demo are:
- Major bugs fixed (85%->90%)
- Balancing: (65%)
Next week, I will balance level 3, the final level of the demo. I’m also considering changing the color of the cave tiles for level 3 to differentiate the last level for the first two. I’ll get through the remaining bugs and see if I’m still up for that. Speaking of bugs, the game becomes a slideshow when there are several enemies on the screen. I’ll need to make another optimization pass.