All Cave Stages Balanced 

This month, I focused on getting all 13 cave stages to a higher quality. I went through each stage and changed the layout, enemy count, and camera constraints. It was a lot of work going through each, but this is the game dev life. 

The hardest part was making the "survival" waves fun. For the most part, the player can just run away and avoid combat, which is not my intention. I had to come up with stage layouts that made fighting a better option than running.

New Popups

When the player was buying something at the store, it always felt like something was missing. I added two new popups. One to confirm the purchase and another after the purchase has been successful.

Another popup that I added was a tutorial popup. I decided to use a popup instead of writing the tutorial ingame. I got some feedback after a playtest, and players would not read the texts ingame. I also wanted to display popups in other situations. I didn't want to rely on always writing it ingame. The "traditional" approach made more sense.

I am glad my popup system allows for such flexibility. Adding these took less work than I thought.

New Player Facing Indicator 

I added an indicator to signal where the player is facing. This facilitates aiming your attacks. For someone watching another person playing the game, it helps them understand what is happening.

Improved Save System 

I made a major change to my save system. Before, whenever I was going to save data, I would have to call each system individually and ask them to write their modifications. 

Now, all I have to do is call the save method, and it will fire a callback. All systems registered will get notified, and they can go in and write their modifications. After that, the save system will write the changes to a file. 

It was a bit more cumbersome than what I expected. Moving forward, it should make the system more stable.

What's Next

The plan for this month is to get all forest stages to the same quality as the cave stages. 

I also plan on entering the game for the Steam Next Fest Feb 2024. The deadline is at the end of October. I want to have my Steam page set up and ready for it. 

Follow my progress on Twitter @brightflask.