Balancing, Widget Styles, and A Little Jam

Immunity Wars

I started work on the tutorial for the game, and I also did a few bug fixes and supported another teammate as they used my ability demonstration recorder tool.

Micro Star Command

This week I got a playtester to play the game and it went quite well. Despite the playtester being a fairly casual gamer and slow learner, she picked up the game very quickly and was able make it very far without the game feeling too difficult. In fact, the difficulty seemed to fluctuate between feeling easy and challenging which is ideal, in my opinion, as it means that the rewards made the player feel powerful, but they wouldn't trivialize the game, or at least not for long.

After the playtest I made a variety of balance changes like making it so that money rewards scale over time, and the player is more likely to progress up relic ranks rather than collecting all of the relics of a certain rarity before moving to the next. I'm also in the process of making a few more relics and adding bosses to the game.

I also made a base stylized widget class using C++ that would have a map of style names to styles for all different kinds of widget elements, and apply those styles appropriately to all child widgets. That way I can customize the entire game's UI from a single place. I also made it so that each type of widget could have different styles (like title vs paragraph for text boxes) that I could switch between in code or by adding the style to the end of the widget's name. This was inspired by the theme system from Godot; however, Unreal clearly wasn't designed to have a system like this as I had to make it in C++ and it lags severely whenever I change one of the styles despite my project being small and the code simple.