This Week's Tasks:

Now that our basic features are “complete” for release, there are a lot of bugs (visual or otherwise) that need to be ironed out. Synergies are one of the newest additions, so I've gotten a lot of feedback from the team for how we could make things feel more impactful, juicy, or balanced. Increasing the speed and adding circular rotation to the tornado object was an easy addition that the team liked the idea of. Increasing the size of the Mine Dropper mines has also been talked about for a while, and now that it's also being used in one of the synergies, I went ahead and increased the prefab size. Our artist said we might want to scale them up even more, but in my opinion the explosion took up too much space when that happened, especially if there were multiple on screen at once. I think we could mess with a balance of decreasing spawn rate but increasing size, if we really want larger mines.

At one point over the past few weeks, we noticed that effects like Burn and Jolt weren't showing up on the normal enemies. It wasn't really a priority because the functionality was still working, but I was the one who initially made some adjustments to effect sizes, so I was put on the task to fix it. This ended up being a hands-on lesson on how lazy code can come back to bite you. Originally, the effect sizes weren't scaling well, due to how the prefab scales were different for each enemy. A while back, I did some math to adjust this properly for the larger enemies:

This worked well, but the reason that it stopped working is because I checked directly for the object name, and applied the formula if the name did not contain “Enemy”. At the time, this worked because “Enemy” was the name for the small enemies, and the bosses had other names. However, we eventually refactored so that each enemy has a different name based on their prefab, so the formula was applying to the small enemies and making the size of the effect incredibly small. Figuring out that this was the problem took much longer than the fix itself, which was just a one-line change:

Now, we have an enum so that we can just get the name of each enemy as necessary. I should've planned for this ahead of time, maybe by getting a reference to the correct prefab or something like that, but my method of checking the object's name was rushed and was bound to run into an issue like this eventually.

Work in Progress:

The Piercing-Elemental synergy has been a point of difficulty and discussion for the past couple of weeks. It's supposed to duplicate the projectile that activates it, which it can do, but the issue is that not every Piercing crystal is a projectile. Slash, for example, has been tricky to make work with this synergy, but I have a basic idea working:

The idea from the team was to spawn an invisible copy of the original crystal, which almost works, but just has too many dependencies for it to work without rewriting a lot of things. I may go in that direction in the future, but I'll have to talk with some people about it this week. The important part is that we have something usable at least.