v0.10.1 is here and it's filled with lots of new content.
New levels
There are 12 new levels - 8 in the first sector, 4 in the second. Two of them are replacements of old levels. If you watched me streaming during the "Games of Quebec" sale event, you may have seen me design some of these levels. It was a lot of fun. Each of these new levels is a kind of a unique puzzle.
Balancing
I spent most of the past week pulling my hair out as I was trying to balance the numbers that determine damage levels of each tower. ːsteammockingː I started by creating a spreadsheet and tried to estimate the equivalent damage that each tower would deal to enemies within a given amount of time. This was a good direction, but it wasn't much help eventually. That is because, if the damage dealt by these towers was so easily comparable, then the game would have been very boring. I'll try to explain.
Out of the eight tower types, there are five which can be considered primary attack towers - Gun, Pyro, Shock, Laser, Spikes. The whole balancing exercise was meant to justify the raison-d'etre of each of these towers. On the one hand they have to deal comparable damage without being too powerful and on the other hand they have to excel above their counterparts in certain specific situations. The only way to achieve that was playing a lot of levels in controlled settings. I believe I've achieved that balance now.
I don't know, if I should explain any of this here or I should let you discover these strategies on your own. I'll give some bold points.
Let's consider Gun as a reference tower and compare the others with it. Note that all towers cost the same.
- Spikes do the same damage as Guns, but they don't block the enemies' path. They pause enemy briefly, possibly exposing them to other kind of damage.
- Pyro is weaker than Gun, but note that its fire damages health directly irrespective of the shield and the fire is caught by everyone in the cone of fire. So Pyro is good against crowds.
- Shock and Laser each are significantly more powerful than the Gun. However they are crippled by the fact that Shock cannot damage health while Laser cannot damage shield. Therefore typically they are most useful when used together. Also because of this conditional nature of damage, they are useful in certain scenarios, namely larger maps and concentrated enemy waves. Imagine that you have 20 crystals for the loadout. You can either choose a Gun-only strategy by assigning 20 crystals to Gun damage OR you could choose a Shock-Laser strategy with 10 crystals assigned to each of their damage attributes. Both these strategies will perform comparably if the map is big enough and enemies are spread evenly. However Shock-Laser strategy can deal significantly greater damage if enemy waves are concentrated and you have enough time to build big enough maze. This can prove very useful if you are trying to set a "Crowd Crusher" time record.
Removal of the "Delay" attribute
Just like different towers, I thought hard about different tower attributes and if they really need to be there. One attribute didn't pass that test. The "Delay" attribute defines the time taken for construction and upgrade of towers. It's a legitimate thing to minimize using crystals, however its effect is not apparent compared to the other attributes. Moreover its effect overlaps with the effect of the "Cost" attribute. In fact the "Cost" attribute plays major role in the player's perception of how long it takes to build the tower. For all these reasons I decided to discard this attribute altogether.
Pyro simplification
One part of balancing the damage was to simplify the damage mechanic. I had a detailed fire damage mechanism in place. Each enemy type had a different susceptibility to the fire and each had a different fire extinguish rate. This made the model rich, but it made balancing difficult. They are also hard to expose to the players in order to inform their strategic thinking. So I removed these variations and now fire affects similarly to all the enemy types.
Moreover the "Reload" attribute didn't make sense for the Pyro. This is because the fire burst is not instantaneous, like the Gun shot. It happens over a period of time. That doesn't play well with the reload/cooldown parameter. Therefore now the fire burst is of constant length in time and the cooldown between the bursts is constant too.
Laser Logic
A big chunk of my time was spent in redoing the Laser logic. You may have noticed that upgrading a laser increases its muzzle count. Each of these muzzles are independent of each other. This makes the implementation of laser a bit complex. My first take at this implementation was incomplete. Now that's fixed. Laser muzzles can now destroy all four types of targets - enemies, creep, gates and spoils. The laser muzzles also have a different policy on preemptive re-targeting than other towers. Once they latch on to a target, they won't let it go until it's either dead or out of range. This makes them more or less useful depending upon the situation.
Music
I had a lot of fun with Loopcloud in the past week. I bought loops from this one label called "Ghost Syndicate" and composed 4 new background scores. You now have total 6 different background scores to listen to while playing the levels. I personally enjoy these scores. They linger in my head long time after I've stopped playing.
Other stuff
- Fixed the issues with Train physics. The enemies now don't run into the train carriages or do other silly stuff. They either wait politely or get butchered in style!
- New explosion VFX for grinder and train deaths. The new ones look more decent than their predecessors in a way.
- Fixed some bugs in the cleanup code when levels are finished abruptly
- Increased the max range of enemy Wave amplitude in the editor
- The Shock and Laser are now introduced in the same level and that level has been replaced by a new one called "Shocking carnage". This should highlight the fact that they are complimentary to each other. Another level named "Swirling Mass" replaces the previous laser introduction level.
- Updated the shock wave VFX so that it's subtly different based on Shock tower level
- The Laser muzzles park themselves at 120 deg from each other, which makes it easy to know the current upgrade level of the Laser
- Reduced the glow in some VFX to avoid headache (subjective!)
- Updated Enemy's rigid body physics to follow good practice guidelines
Whoa... that was a long list.
Take care everyone.
Until next time.
