4 JUN 2022:
This week was mostly about balance.
If you think about it, making a game is very similar to someone making a sword. You could have a blade that is extremely sharp, but if it's not balanced properly, the wielder is going to tire out fast. That is why balance is so important in game design as well as in sword-making. We've all played those games that go like this:
Level 1 -- Easy
Level 2 -- A little bit harder
Level 3 -- Suddenly very hard!
That's a sign of a very unbalanced game and I often find myself giving up on games that do that.
At the moment, there are parts of Scrapship that feel very unbalanced. To fix this, I've started rethinking the relationships between different objects in the game.
For example, the Carrier enemy is in the same "class" as the battleship, but has 3x more hit points and takes up twice as much of the screen. It is also over 3 times the file size (500k vs 130k).
To fix these inconsistencies, I've been plotting out in Excel how all the different game assets and objects relate to each other. If the screen size is X by Y, what should be the max size of a planet graphic in the background? If the max planet size is X by Y, what should be the max size of the final boss enemy? And so forth all the way down to the smallest enemy and even projectiles.
When I'm done mapping all this out, the result will be much greater balance and consistency across the board, resulting in a better play experience. It will also affect things like frame rate, because larger enemies take longer to load than smaller ones. A giant planet background may look cool, but can also bring the game to a crawl. And as I'm learning the hard way, it doesn't make much sense to have a 1940x1940 planet background that is only going to be on-screen for about 10 seconds before being scaled down or moved off-screen.
Much of this week was more about number-crunching than actual programming. How slow should a shield fighter move? How fast should a shield fighter move? At either of those speeds, how quickly should the player be able to destroy them? How much more powerful should weapon A be against weapon B?
A lot of this sounds like it should have been thought about early on -- and you'd be right. But as I'm finding out, the problem with game design is that sometimes you don't know what you need to do until you see that your initial plans aren't working.
I still feel like Scrapship is on the right track and I'm not too worried about Scope Creep. The game is only going to have 5 levels and 5 main enemies. The challenging part is getting it all to mesh together in a way that makes sense and is fun.
Quote of the Week:
"If you want the rainbow, you have to tolerate the rain."
Thanks for reading and have a great rest of your week!