A Month of Work

I've been rather lazy when it comes to writing my blog this month so this one is going to be big.

Micro Star Command

Visual Improvements

I started off the month by making a variety of visual improvements, including making a background material, star particle texture, post-processing improvements, and other small details.

Before After

Tutorial

I then created a simple tutorial and an info screen for the game. The tutorial involved showing the player where to click and drag to command their units, and would prompt them to bring up the info screen.

The info screen itself had explanations of the galaxy map, a list of controls, and a glossary explaining some terms used in tooltips that might be confusing. I also went through a few iterations of the info screen to improve its formatting and readability.

This whole tutorial setup is likely temporary, but I'm currently waiting to get some playtests, so that I can see where new players are struggling.

Feedback Forums

Since I had published the game on Itch, I wanted to make sure that strangers could provide feedback if they wanted, so I added feedback and bug-reporting forums and linked them in the game.

Main Menu

I next made the main menu for the game, it was nothing special and just had the bare-bones functionality. This was the last major thing I added before releasing the v0.1.0 version of the game.

Balancing

I then worked on rebalancing much of the game based of the feedback I had gotten from some limited playtesting. This was also what inspired the reformatting of the info screen. This rebalancing involved adding a new system for AI reaction time scaling, as well as a whole host of number changes to attempt to make the later game harder without creating a sharp difficulty spike. I also attempted to make several weak relics stronger and strong relics weaker to help normalize their utility.

Sounds

Next was the long and tedious task of finding music and sound effects for everything in the game. This was a fairly new experience for me as I've never really had to find all the sound effects for a game before. It was a struggle to find good CC0 sounds, so I sometimes attempted to modify sounds but with little success as I've never used programs like Audacity before. Either way the whole ordeal was unpleasant but has also given me a newfound respect for all the audio people out there.

I also needed to add volume settings to the game, but this was a fairly trivial task and a pleasant return to the familiar. After which it was time to release the v0.2.0 update, and write the devlog.

More Balancing & Late Game Content

Next would come the task of adding the last half of the game's content, as up to this point the game was only half as long as I wanted it to be. I also had to take into account the feedback I'd gotten from another very small round of playtesting and adjusted the balance some more.

The game is divided into 4 segments with bosses at the end of each, and the first two had already been made. Each segment would introduce a new enemy type, and contain elite versions of the previously introduced type. Also at each segment a new tier of relics would become available for both the player and enemies. Each bossfight would also introduce a new boss mechanic.

The later segments were fairly easy to add as I already planned them out and made most of the content that would be in them. The main problem I had was personally playtesting them as they required about 30-60 minutes of gameplay to reach. So I implemented a system that allowed me to press a button to win any fight, but this still required me to select my path, rewards, and load the encounters. This wasn't fast enough so I implemented a better kip function that could still be used to win any encounter, but could also be used to auto select rewards, automatically pick the path on the galaxy map, and could win encounters without loading into them. This made getting to the late game much easier, though I also had to be careful that the early and mid game didn't become unbalanced.

Scaling Up

Now that the game was longer several mechanics proved to be insufficent.

The galaxy generation was too variable in how it picked what type each sector would be. This meant that sometimes there would be 8 shops and other times only 1, and this would mean that the difficulty of the game was somewhat random. To alleviate this I switched the system from picking types from a weighted list to using a pool system. This made the number of shops and elites much more stable, though slightly random due to the number of sectors varying.

Additionally the enemy scaling was too discrete. Previously enemies would have some number of level ups after a certain number of sectors had been cleared, but this resulted in the difficulty of elites having a strange sawtooth pattern if you were to graph it out, and it wouldn't support slight difficulty changes. To fix this I simply swapped integers for floats and adjusted the logic accordingly.

Lastly, several of my algorithms relating to the galaxy map and whether or not the system were reachable, would either lag horribly or crash the game due to call stack overflow. This was because I was using recursive blueprint functions, which have a very short call stack and are very inefficient. I had to rewrite several functions to use iterative algorithms. I also had to implement some caching of values where iterative approaches wouldn't work.

Difficulty Selection

The last thing I added before the v0.3.0 release was the difficulty selection system which would change the starting strength and enemy scaling depending on what option the player had selected at the beginning of the game. It was actually quite easy to implement as I had a few numbers that I could just multiply to change everything I wanted.

I also wanted to add a small amount of meta progression and make the late game easier to reach, so I made it so the game would save how far the player has gotten in the past and allow them to start halfway to their highest distance. Also while implementing saving for this I also made it to the volume settings saved too.

After the v0.3.0 release I took a week break to go on vacation with my family while also waiting for playtesting data.

UI Improvments

This week I have been working on improving the UI and increasing the amount of information displayed to the player. I first added a bar at the top of the screen that showed the relative strengths of each faction and could be hovered over to show the stats of each faction. The hope is that this could give the player a good idea of who the most dangerous enemies are at a glance, and serve as a better way to show enemy stats than the slide out menu.

Next I upgraded the tooltip system such that it supported lists of stats and those stars had their own tooltips. I had gotten a lot of complaints that people didn't fully understand what relics were doing, especially upgraded versions of the same relic. While going through all of the stats of all of the relics, I made quite a few changes, and to support some of those changes, I reworked the strength and HP systems to use floats instead of ints that way I could make things like formations spawning 2x the number of probes that all deal half damage.

Thats All Folks

This concludes my summary of the last month of work, though i"ve left out a whole bunch of smaller things like bug fixes and tiny improvements. Thanks for giving this monster of a blog post a read.