As we entered into the new year, we had one thing on our mind. CAMPAIGN MODE! After doing all of that marketing and self promoting in the late fall and early winter, all we wanted to do was settle in and really start working on the game again. I would in fact say, “We are going in for a deep dive, who knows when we might come up for air again.” We needed an opportunity to break the game for a while to change some fundamental rules, which is impossible to do while trying to show a level of polish to the outside world.
There were several major structural changes we had to make to our game to get campaign mode working. First, how the levels themselves we being handled. Before we had a set of pre-designed levels with different modules and aliens and difficulties all set up in them. However, with the players ability to swap their station around between each run, there was no way we could have an already made level for every possible combination. Therefore, we had to go the route of creating the modules during runtime as a level loaded. Which also means we need certain objects to persist through different scenes to tell the levels what to do. Which also means we couldn’t rely on references made through the inspector before runtime because we didn’t know what was going to be in the level. Which also means we had to make sure everything loaded in the correct order so everything had the references they needed. Etc, etc, etc, I think you get the point lol. Over the last year we spent a lot of work designing our vertical slice of score attack, which I think was a great thing to do. However, it was missing fairly large chunks of what the final game was actually going to have, which ended up making us take some big steps backwards under the hood just to get the ball rolling again.
Luckily, our game is not that complicated, and while there were some challenges switching it over to this new system, it didn’t take a lifetime before we had something working in a debug menu. The next step for us was a lot more fun. We needed a place for the player to actually access these choices between runs and make changes. We obviously could have just made it a series of flat 2D menus, however, we are all 3D artists so it had to be a physical space! We settled on the player having a bedroom/command room where they would be able changes things, explore, and play around a bit. It was a perfect opportunity to let our technical artist, Bryan, kind of go crazy on silly art, especially because since this was a different scene from our main game play area we didn’t need to worry about any sort of performance limitations. This was also a great chance for us to really settle on how much information and choice we wanted to player to have. Obviously swapping in modules and amenities in the station were important, but things like daily weather forecasts, news clips, space social media all are part of the information package the player needs to look at to decide how they want to design their station for their next run.
One of the challenges that we weren’t really thinking about yet was one of balance. In our old system, every run was balanced because the levels could never change, so things were automatically balanced against themselves when it came to high scores. However, with people having more control over what they are doing, we have to start thinking about how each action in the game compares to every other action in the game, in both ease of use and opportunity for space dollars. We know this is going to be a long process and every change to the game will shift the balance of power, so we aren’t trying to nail it down just yet. Its more like we have at least exchanged emails with the balance monster and have had a cordial discussion about expectations of the future.
Overall, these changes (plus a couple others I can’t talk about quite yet) have been absouletly awesome to work on. While they have been big changes and challenges, these are the types of things we love working on. There is nothing quite like tackling a big problem as a team and surmounting it. We still have a lot of work to do but we have been making great progress!
-Ian