Balance Patch and QA!

Author: Tyler Clardy
Date Posted: 7/23/2024

This week has been largely focused on preparation for QA testing before we publish our final build on Sunday. My teammate focused on some high-priority bugfixing while I focused on balancing patches and the 'feel' of the gameplay.

I spent a good chunk of time playtesting the game. I went through our game loop over and over and took notes on what I noticed in regard to balance, difficulty, fun, annoyance, and bugs. I shared these notes with my teammate, and then got to work smoothing out the rough edges of the game.

The enemies got rebalanced with a focus on movement speed, attack power, health, currency value, and points value. I also found that our ranged enemy was completely missing the logic to drop pickups, so I implemented that. I also fine-tuned the spawn rates for our waves.

Then I rebalanced the player with a focus on movement speed, health, ammo, stamina costs, damage, and rate of fire. Next, I fine-tuned the pickups system to adjust the ammo and health pickup values to match the player changes, and added support for multiple item spawners. We needed more item spawners spread throughout our level since it has quadrupled in size since its conception.

Lastly, I fixed a few miscellaneous bugs, mostly relating to the UI, touched up the tutorial, and rebalanced our objective's health value.

We are now prepared to begin QA testing! We are doing a small QA test consisting of our peers, friends, and family. Keep an eye on this space - our game launches here this upcoming Sunday afternoon.