This last week I worked on creating a progression system for our game to allow for players to feel like they are advancing when playing through our game. I made a currency system which determines a payout for the player depending on their ranking in the game. Before coding this, I had to make sure to balance all this out so I created a data chart that shows how much a payout will give based on rankings and what items will cost to make sure you don't earn too much or too little based on payouts.
I also focused on making a ranking system which will excite the player when they are unsure of how well they did. The rank bar slowly has it's bar value increase based on the maximum rank they can get. As it gets closer to S-Rank, the speed of the bar starts getting closer to build anticipation and make the player feel a rush of dopamine as it hits the S-rank.
The last large thing I worked on to improve this week was changing the way the shop, equipment menu, and the player HUD look to give information to the player and work properly. The shop and equipment now work with the new player abilities added in by Tony. I was able to connect them into the shop, make them equip automatically, and update the game manager to make sure everything worked properly. The HUD now also makes it show the new abilities when they are equipped.
Next week I would like to work on a new boss or level design for our new gameplay loop that we created. Since we scrapped a lot of things, we are starting over and spending a lot of time on making sure bosses and levels feel as best they can for players who are playing the game. I would rather not be delegated to UI duty or interior systems again as I have done a lot on it and would like to try my best on working on other parts of the game that player experiences more directly.
New games came out recently that I really want to play so sometimes I distract myself and play instead of actually working. It can be distracting having this fun experience right next to you at all times, even when you need to work. Another thing keeping me from working is the work itself. It can be very tedious and boring as I usually know what to do, but connecting and going through the motions to make efficient code can still take up to a few hours and it just results in brain-dead work. When I think of work like that, I usually take awhile to get to it.
The team was very good about coming to terms with the fact that our game had problems and needed to drastically change. No one was complaining that all their work was scrapped, or bothered by the fact that the game was slowly going away from the original vision. I think this helped us grow as a team and really understand how to divide work better this week as we divided into pairs on which people dealt with which parts of the game. This allowed for easy collaboration and more organized and divided work for each pair.
The worst thing that went wrong this week was that we needed to rework a lot of things. It was a pain to try and add in new things to fix what was broken and it has resulted in feeling like we have produced less of a game this week than what we fully had before. It is ultimately for the better, but overall, it is a real setback that I wish we could have noticed the problems in earlier.