Week 4: Presentation & Graphics

This week the game saw a lot of graphical and audio changes, as well as some finalisation of mechanics, balance changes, and working in a lot of feedback. I think the main highlights of this week is that the character controller is fully implemented with all the appropriate animations, sounds, movement and weapon mechanics. There is a main menu, game end states and menus, and the logic to move between it all. Lets get into it!

Animations & Sprites

I added a lot of graphics to the game this week, but not everything I wanted. Still on the list is animations for the majority of the undead. Each needs at minimum a moving animation, and an attacking animation. I might need to forego an animation for spawning (I was thinking of rising up from the ground) because I don't know if I will have the time for that. If worse comes to worst I might need to get some assets from elsewhere, but everything I've looked at online doesn't really match my beginners art style. I have a fun idea for the death animations required by each enemy: replace it with a particle system made up of different parts of the given enemy. I think it would be quite satisfying to see a zombie explode into parts from a shotgun blast, but more on that next week!

A significant change to me, but likely less so to the player, is that now animation speeds related to weapon actions actually scale with the time it takes to do said action. So a reload animation will speed up as the player decreases their reload time with upgrades. Very cool.

In terms of what needs finishing, I really only need to complete work on the house, and make an animation for the workbench for when it gets used. In terms of what has been added, the trees now have proper graphics, the guns all have proper sprites and animations, the basic zombie has a moving animation, all player animations have been added, and a good amount of UI icons. The launcher projectile sprite has also been drawn, but I forgot to add it into the game. Oops!

SFX

I also started the process of adding sound effects to all the different interactions and things, where having sound would make sense. Each gun has reload and shooting SFX for example, the player has footsteps, jumping and landing noises, and a damage sound. There are sounds for when ammo is crafted, and when it cannot be crafted. What is left to be added are UI sounds like button clicks, and game end or wave end states. There are also a lot of SFX to be added to the different enemies, like damage, death, attacking, and just generally having them produce random noises would add to the atmosphere of the game. No music has been added yet, still thinking on that part. Unfortunately, it's difficult to show of the sounds of the game in this devlog, so I suggest going and playing the game yourself!

Balance

I got a lot of feedback on different things this week, and it resulted in a lot of changes, for the better I think. Changes are as follows:

• Increased ammo purchase amounts. Ammo, especially rifle ammo, was far too expensive, at 2 scrap for a single bullet. However, I want to keep scrap as whole numbers, so I could only reduce the cost by so much. Therefore it made more sense to instead increase the amount of ammo given per craft, which also helped reduce time spent crafting at the table, while also not eliminating it. 
• Speaking of ammo costs, upgrades for ammo cost reduction were just in general, OP. Too OP, unless starting off at an extremely high scrap cost. Instead, I chose to remove the ammo cost decrease upgrades from rifle and shotgun. The rocket still has the upgrade but at a high cost, as I doubt it is feasible for the player to reduce the cost to zero throughout the game without extreme luck and good foresight to save scrap. Considering adding upgrades to increase ammo given on craft for shotgun and rifle.
• Alongside this, scrap drop amounts were increased.
• And finally in the cost adjustment category, notably strong upgrades were increased in base cost. Also, upgrade cost also scales with how many times that particular upgrade for that particular gun has been purchased. Some costs get big fast.
• Upgrade power for percentage upgrades was also increased, as it was noted they felt too weak. They now sit at 10%, but this could possibly be increased by more.
• Time for branch to reset lowered, also lowered time for branch to snap.
• Shotgun shells now reload one at a time, and reloading can be cancelled.

And that about concludes the changes for balance. The game feels a bit more satisfying to progress through now, but I think more could be done to keep waves fresh. I am considering reducing the amount of waves the game will have down to 10, introducing an enemy every 1, or 2 waves. We will see.

Misc

Other additions include that now zombies pause for a short time upon attacking, to allow for the attack animation in the future. Upgrades cards were fixed to display their upgrade amounts properly, often negative numbers would be rendered incorrectly. The player also actually has their health reset at the start of each new wave now. And finally, another five waves were implemented, for a total of ten waves.  And that's about it! Next week it's getting everything polished and ready, and some final testing. Almost done!