Chaos Tomb is too hard. What makes it too hard? Short answer: I made the treasure too hard to reach, so players were poorly equipped to play the game. I should have made weapons and hearts easier to access, and hidden something else (gold coins, stars, collectible keychains) around the levels to challenge players. For the long answer, see the full article, complete with visualizations using D3.js.
I’ll have to cut my participation short this year, but by no means am I going to give up. Just going to have to make it smaller! I’m going to try and squeeze everything into 36 hours or so.
Going to use raw WebGL again, and this time I’ve got most of a proper text system. I can mess with the text in the vertex shader, and get nasty output like this. And hey–it handles kerning properly and calculates line breaks with the Knuth-Plass algorithm, because I have fun overengineering things.
To test game balance, I wrote a script to test combat between all possible shapes you can shift into. It’s basically an automatic 2v2 arena with the results summarized in a table. The first number in each cell tells you how often the monster to the left wins, and the second number tells you how often the monster at the top wins.
So you can see that the “air” monster is quite victorious, only losing fights against the mage–and even then, it still wins 22% of the time. I’m going to have to nerf that monster a lot. Or maybe I’ll just stick it at the end. The bat is also a bit overpowered.
“Unicorn” and “glip” don’t win, but they’re not really supposed to win by themselves.
Trying, trying, trying but it’s not a game yet.
Here’s your intrepid, randomly-generated crew. With cool sunglasses. You’ll have to earn those.
And here’s the Expensive Undertaking, a badly damaged ship with only enough power to run one room at a time. Uh oh! Well, that’s the view in the Unity editor. I ditched vanilla JavaScript this time around, and I probably should have done it earlier.
This is actually my first Unity game that’s not a team game. Let’s see how badly it goes!
Tags: progress, screenshot