It’s the summer time and that means that my kids go to be with their mom which opens things up for more productivity for me. That said I still have a lot of question marks that need to be worked out in the coming two weeks. I’ve resolved myself to stay in the military if I don’t have a job by then. I have a solid second interview coming so we’ll see how that goes. It will be a real relief when I have some idea where things will be going with my life soon.
Most of this past week was spent preparing for the trip to drop off my kids but I did get a couple of hours in to work on Six Aspects. I decided to relax a bit with my mentor Chris on Tuesday and just do a play through as I marked down some bugs that we came across. We talked about usability and how the game could polish up this point or that point. I’m looking for a great sound to go with the “go” button in the game. It’s going to be pressed so much that I think it will be important to give it a very satisfying sound when pressed. I also discovered some more flaws with the combat system as negative numbers kept popping up.
I fixed the negative combat damage numbers the following day by creating a check for less than zero damage and assigning a damage value of 1. The issue was that defense values could be high enough that they cause damage values to fall below zero as they are subtracted from final damage numbers.
I also found through game play that the troops were leveling up way to fast and so I pulled the experience curve down quite a bit. The big issue was I was awarding experience for each kill to the entire player squad. This means that if the enemy was the same level as the player and the player killed 4 enemies that’s a level for each troop in combat. In theory this is fine until you realize that there can be 7 enemies in a squad and there are multiple squads. Players don’t get levels awarded until the end of the level which means that they can really rack up way to much experience and gain on average 3-6 levels during a stage.
The money rewards were also tweaked a bit to reference enemy deploy costs and give some randomization. I keep having to reduce the amount of money the player is receiving as they seem to have an easy time accumulating it over the course of a stage. I suspect there will be a lot of feeling out the numbers as I make changes over the coming weeks.
I’m hoping to make some life decisions to focus so that I can turn my full attention to getting a solid early access version of the game out to players soon. I just need to pace myself and understand that it’s OK when everything doesn’t happen all at once. We just take things one step at a time to get through those big changes in our lives.