Week of the Final Features

Protocol Xeno

This week we decided to put Voidsinger on the backburner for the rest of the school year as it would not get anywhere close to a game in the time we have left. Instead of working on Voidsinger, we decided to spend this last month polishing Protocol Xeno: Excavate!. This week we made the last of our major feature changes with the exception of a possible map expansion. In the coming weeks, we will add an interactive tutorial, game settings including control rebinding, improved enemy AI, UI overhaul, number tuning and balancing, controller and touch support, and versions for Windows, Mac, Linux, IOS, and Andriod.

Tuning

Much of my time this week was spent tuning the game to make it more fun, incentivize player choices and tradeoffs, and flattening difficulty spikes. Much of our game balance comes from stats that scale based on mathematical curves that take their level as an input. The game had a difficulty spike that would kill even devlop[ers who had given themselves infinite resources. I found that if I looked at the derivative of the damage scaling curve of the enemies I found that most players would die right at the maximum value of the function (around level 23). Using this knowledge I planned the difficulty spike and moved its peak from the start of mid game to the start of late game.