During the third sprint I had less time to work than I would’ve liked, so I focused on getting the most important tasks done: finishing up the upgrade system. I decided that this would be the best thing to focus on first since it’ll be the most relevant to players in the next playtest. In an idle game, upgrades keep the game from slowing to a grinding halt and give players more goals to work towards. They’re a bit like footholds on a rock wall, giving something for the players to reach to and giving them a boost to reach the next goal.
First off was optimization. Like I mentioned in the last blog post, using “upgradeSets” instead of prerequisites was a misstep, so I corrected it, rewriting the code to remove upgrade sets and having my future code use prerequisites instead. It wasn’t too difficult a switch because the verifier hadn’t been implemented yet.
Sprint 2 for me was all about the back-end for upgrades, so all that was left for me to add was the front-end for the player. Basically, getting the GUI ready. I did this with two main scripts. First, I made a generic upgradeButton prefab that instantiates a button with a certain upgrade, displays the appropriate upgrade name and price on the button, and tries to purchase the upgrade when clicked. Next, I made a buttonManager script that checks if the requirements for an upgrade are met whenever the player buys a generator or upgrade (since those are the only things that could cause it to update) and instantiates a button prefab.
Here it is working!
The only trick was making sure upgrades display on the correct spot on the screen. To do this, when the buttons are instantiated they get added to a list, and all elements in the list get lined up on the screen based on their spot in the list. When a button is clicked and the purchase is successful, it gets deleted and removed from the list, which lets all upgrades ahead of it slide back into place nicely.
The only thing left before I could get it working was to input the rest of the data from our spreadsheet into the upgrade library in the game. It was a little tedious, but didn’t take more than half an hour and it got all 21 of our upgrades in the game. The one issue I ran into is that the most expensive upgrade is $9 billion dollars, but for some reason the unity interface wouldn’t let me input more than 8.999999999, which is weird since that isn’t any kind of integer limit. For now, players will probably never be able to tell the difference, and balance wise, 9 billion is basically no different than 8.999999999 billion, but we may want to look into this in the future.
But with that, all 21 base upgrades are in the game! We may want to look into some more later, which would require an expansion of the system, but for now, I’m very happy with it and proud of my work. With this, two of our core features, generators and upgrades, are fully implemented. Now, all that’s left before our game is ready is items.
Upgrades weren’t too much trouble for me since I had a plan, but I don’t have one yet for items and I’ll be working with other people’s code, so it may prove more challenging. It’ll also require more steps and interconnectedness than the previous tasks. However, I’m still confident that we’ll be able to do it.
No comments:
Post a Comment