This is one of those devlog entries that seems kind of dull because there’s been a lot of ‘under the hood’ type goings on and not a lot of eye-candy to show for it.

But, it’s taken time and it’s really important to the game’s development so I’m going to blog it anyway, boring or not!

What I’ve been focussing on is the overall structure of the game world and how difficulty progresses throughout the game. At this stage it has been very much a first pass at this, as much about providing the tools to allow me to tweak gameplay efficiently as it has been about balancing the gameplay itself.

I’ve broken down what I’ve been doing into three key tasks:

1. Code Refactoring 

As with any game of significant scope, there are multiple interconnected parameters that affect gameplay difficulty in Jetboard Joust and it’s a hell of a lot easier to tweak things if the code that manages these parameters is in one place rather than split across a myriad of individual class files. Consequently I’ve set up a static ‘Config’ class that contains all the algorithms and configuration parameters for pretty much anything to do with rewards and difficulty throughout the game. This has involved a lot of tedious cut and paste but I know it’ll be worth the effort in the long run (it already has really). I’ve set up generic parameters here for the amount things like enemy health and weapon damage/difficulty scale throughout the game so at least I have a baseline to work with and can tweak individual scaling from there if necessary.

2. Mapping 

I’ve created a template in InDesign for mapping out levels in each of the game worlds and have been through this with a first pass attempt at placing weapon unlocks and new enemy ‘reveals’ in each. There seems to be enough content to fill four level ‘pyramids’ of around twenty rows each with a reveal rate of a new enemy or weapon every couple of rows.

I need a couple of different ‘non-jetboarding’ enemy types but was expecting that anyway, I added an additional jetboarding enemy to span the difficulty gap between the ‘minion’ and ‘master minion’ which was fairly simple to do. I may make the fifth and final world smaller, probably ten rows, with the final boss right at the end.

3. Auto-Levelling 

In order to be able to arbitrarily test game difficulty I need to be able to jump to a particular level and have an idea how the player might have ‘levelled up’ at that point. What weapons will they have unlocked and how powerful will they be? What will their base health be? It’s not straightforward to figure this stuff out so I ended up writing an algorithm that takes a destination point within the game pyramid, figures out the location of each treasure chamber before that point, then does a mock play though of the game to unlock each treasure item. On the way I collect the cash that would be awarded for defeating enemies, rescuing babies, and completing ‘sectors’ (rows of the pyramid). Once cash is earned it is spent on the most expensive upgrade available.

It took quite a while to test this code and get it working but it’s going to be invaluable for testing as I can now start the game at any point and have the player ‘levelled up’ as appropriate. Using this code I can also monitor things like how long it will take to level up a particular weapon, how much a player might earn for completing a level at the point weapons are unlocked (hence what a sensible starting price for updates might be) and all sorts of other stuff I haven’t even thought of yet!

4. Basic Gameplay Testing 

Using the code above I began going through the game to check and tweak parameter scaling at key points (i.e. the ‘reveal’ level for each weapon and enemy) to make sure things seemed sensibly balanced. Unsurprisingly they were way off to start with but after much fiddling I’ve reached the point where relationships at least seem workable, haven’t done the treasure chamber guardians and bosses at all yet though.

One thing that became apparent was that weapons that are unlocked earlier in the game need to have a greater number of upgrade levels than ones that come later on, otherwise they either ‘max out’ too quickly and end up becoming useless on high level enemies or they cost far to much to upgrade in the early stages. This was particularly apparent with the default weapon (the pistol) so I ended up adding a new default weapon (the .45 magnum, essentially a pistol on steroids) which is unlocked about halfway through the game and has enough grunt to take the player through to the end of the game.

I also ran into a shedload of bugs, it’s been ages since I looked at many of these enemies/weapons so there’s a ton of small issues created by various changes I’ve made. Fixed a bunch of them as I went along (partly why this phase took so long) but I’ve still got a very long TODO list in Trello!

Dev Time: 6 days Total Dev Time: approx 247.5 days