Roguelike Route and Graphics

This week I created a path which players will progress through and some graphics for the enemies and cards. The roguelike path brings a sense of progress to the game and allows players to get a variety of cards and experience new runs every playthrough. The graphics are relatively simple and work but could use some improvements.

The roguelike path is currently a set path but ideally it would be a mostly random. The path is currently a modified node system like the path following system. The current system only has two options for node which are battles and card offers. Battle nodes transport the player to a random battle map. Card offer nodes allow the player to pick to add a new card into their deck and currently also happens after every battle. A problem that occurred with the path is that after a battle the path would no longer work. This occurred because after a battle the time scale is set to zero, to give the players a screenshot of the final moments of the battle, and was solved by resetting the time scale.

Card graphics in the game consist of a rectangle card with the cards name, the cards cost, the stats for the summoned tower, and a graphic to shows the cards architype. Cards graphics fixes the main feedback I have gotten about my game which is that players need more feedback about the tower they are about to play before playing it. The one problem with the cards is that they can be somewhat hard to read before playing. Another problem is that they names of the cards do not fit within the cards name space, for instance the pearl shaman below.

The enemy graphics are of that of common animals seen at beaches, such as ants, crabs, and flies (shown below). Currently all the enemies are not implemented into the game and none of their variations are properly implemented. A problem I had with the ant enemy is that it's animation was hard to see, to fix this I plan to increase the ants limb size and make sure the motion is emphasized enough. A major problem that occurred was that the enemies rotation would not work correctly and the health bar would rotate with them. To fix this I had to physically rotate the sprites out of unity and I had to create a custom program to ensure the health bars would not rotate with the enemies. Doing this I also fixed the problem that the enemies health bars where too low for the enemy.

This week I too main points of feedback, which was that the roguelike route was too similar too the battles and that the game was too barren. Neither of these problems have been fixed yet but I plan to add aesthetics around the battles and around the route which should help to differentiate the scenes and make them less barren.