One of the main challenges of Sprint 4 for me was that I didn’t have an overall theme this time, and instead was just doing some miscellaneous tasks. With the major systems complete and waiting on the lead for items to be ready for me to work on, there wasn’t a major milestone this time.
First, I optimized the upgrade system. Following the ideas I had in the last sprint, I got the system optimized so it works smoother.
Since items were our next big-ticket item I got the framework set up for item discovery. You can see the code here, it was pretty straightforward, and just triggers a debug message where adding the item would go. This was as far as I could get for now, but it was good to know it was working.
Next, I thought it would be interesting to see how the game plays–and discovered there was a slight balancing issue. Since our plan was to go for additive multipliers, but we implemented multiplicative multipliers since those worked better, the income multipliers the player could get were higher than they should be, and made upgrades have too overpowering of an impact on the game. I brought this up to our lead, and got a new task to rebalance the multipliers so they would be equivalent to what the additive system would’ve been.
For example, adding a x2 multiplier, then a x6 multiplier would result in a x8 multiplier overall. I would take something like this and convert it to multiplying a x2 multiplier by a x4 multiplier to get the same x8 overall. Making these small adjustments to every set of upgrades left the game in a much more balanced state. This was a simple task, but one that’s worth some explanation.
Lastly I tackled the advanced upgrades. This included an upgrade for Spambots that increase their multiplier for every other building owned, and a set of upgrades for every other generator that increase their income based on the number of ChopDocs owned. Since the upgrade system wasn’t built to do this, it required a little finesse–just a checker for the ids of these unique upgrades to redirect to their unique code. Not super elegant, but functional for now, though worth optimizing if the game ever gets bigger; though this will probably be the extent of the scope. The only other upgrades after this will be related to item discovery, and then they’ll be done.
Anyways, as shown in this gif, I got them working. It took me about a day’s work to iron out the kinks, but otherwise it didn’t give me too much trouble. I will say that they do serve an important role to bridge the gap between the 50 generator upgrade and the 100 generator upgrade.
That might sound like a bit of work, and it was, but I definitely had more room to improve during this sprint. I could’ve done some more work on the game, I think we were just in an awkward place where there wasn’t more programming needed at the moment. Which is fine–it shows that we’re well on track to completing the project.
In conclusion, I’m excited to tackle items in the upcoming sprint. Since they’re the main +1 feature, I’ve been eager to get started working on them, and now that everything in the base game is functional, we’re finally ready. I think the game will really start looking complete once we get the art imported onto the menu.
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