Jordan's Log: Week 11

This week was fixing bugs, balancing, and putting in vfx. Early on in the week I wrote a script to control particles spawned when a cell spread immunity. It seemed to work at first, but with more testing it was clear that there was 1 frame where a spawned particle would be huge and then correct itself to the appropriate size. Instead of changing the particle system’s settings before playing it, I’m now just emitting individual particles so I can have better control over each one. This has fixed the 1 frame issue, but I then noticed a very big design flaw. I have particles’ size dependent on how much immunity is being spread. If a particle’s size is less than .05 then it is impossible to see. Even with particles less than .1 you have to fully concentrate to see them. I decided to lerp particles size between .1 and 1 (instead of a 0-1 scale it’s now .1-1) so that the user can see them. If the immunity exceeds 1 I spawn a particle at full size for each full number. For example if I was spreading 2.5 immunity I would spawn 2 full sized particles and a half (.5) sized particle. I also fixed viruses bumping into one another, although I’m unsatisfied with the solution. I simply made them no longer collide, which looks terrible that they just move through each other. I will hopefully fix this this week. From playtesting this I noticed the best way to use defense was to level it only when a cell was being targeted by a virus. Also, once the game got so lengthy viruses would break through the cell’s defense without the user being able to do much. Defense was also the only stat that didn’t benefit the colony. So now defense is passed on to the cell’s children. It performs much better than previously, but still has balancing issues that I hope to fix soon, but that can wait till the UX testing. As for the vfx, I added the immunity particles, viruses rotating, cells stop rotating when being attacked by a virus, cells fade out when dying and spawn black particles, and viruses stop rotating when attacking a cell.