We received some feedback from our last devlog and we wanted to show our progress after implementing you guy's suggestions. Many of the suggestions we see are things we know we should implement and we are just putting them off until we feel like implementing them is necessary, whether that's for some technical or motivational purposes.
I find it best to polish your game occasionally in order to boost the teams motivation on our project. For the past two weeks, I added different systems in order to make our game feel more exciting to play. These are the polishing systems that were added to the game:
- Camera Shake on Player Shoot
- Distortion when enemies hit the player
- Fixed Bullet Spawn Point
- Converted game to work at 60 FPS
That last polish feature might seem a bit odd to you guys. Interestingly enough, testing your game at a different framerate than your release target framerate can affect the game. Whenever I played the game through the Unity editor, I was playing at over 500 FPS. When I tested our game on a stable release build, I realized that our game became capped at 60 FPS. This significantly affected our game's feel; the player movement was choppy, our movement was slower, our ghost runner effects were less satisfying, and our game overall became less enjoyable to play. In order to fix our problem, I had to go back to Unity and tweek all the variables to match a target fraterate of 60. I also had to make a script that capped my Unity editor to 60 FPS when I pressed the play button. Tweeking all the variables isn't much of a problem; however, it does waste a lot of time to just fix the game to a framerate that is more accessible to everyone. I easily wasted an hour to an hour and a half just making sure everything was right. I suggest that once your game has reached a stage where there is something to test, you should build a development build to make sure that your game runs properly because at the end of the day, you are creating a game that others will download and play.
Outside of the polishing systems, we did some cleaning up on the programming side in order to prepare us for these next couple of weeks. Our ultimate goal for these next weeks are to create difficulty in our game. So far, our game is pretty plain as we are just shooting the same type of enemy and the playing routine is the same. To increase the difficulty of our game, we will be adding new enemies with unique abilities that will challenge the player to play in different ways and buy different upgrades. The first look of different enemy variants can be seen in the video as there are different color spawn particles; for now, the color is the only thing that is changing, not the enemy, but that can be fixed in seconds once we actually create new enemy scripts. Before polishing our game to strengthen our player, we want to strengthen our enemies to make the game more interesting. In my opinion, it is easier to balance the difficulty to make the game easier by upgrading the player later rather than doing it first and balancing the difficulty by upgrading the enemies later to make the game harder.
That is all for this week's update. Please leave any feedback in the comments. Check back in a week or two for the next update on Triangle Shooter!