Blog Entry Part 1: The Problem

This week, I rolled up my sleeves and focused on something that sounds simple but changes everything. Where things show up. Specifically, where the player spawns, where the enemies spawn, and when everything happens, and ramping damage and difficulty. .

At first, our player was spawning in at whatever random place the camera was set. It was... chaotic. Sometimes you'd start halfway off the map, sometimes to near a spawn location. Not exactly as. On top of that, enemies were appearing out of nowhere without any structure or logic, and we had no way to scale difficulty over time. It all made playtesting feel more like guessing than game development. Especially when we were working on a prototype for our game loop. 

Blog Entry Part 2: The Fix (AKA “Let There Be Spawn”)

I started by building a proper player spawn point. Now, instead of spawning wherever the Unreal Engine gods roll their dice, the player starts at a designated spot in the world, predictable, clean, and way more professional. (No more falling from the sky into chaos. Unless that’s what we want. Then… maybe.)

Next up,  enemy spawners. I placed specific spawn points across the level and linked them up to a new spawner system that handles when enemies appear and how many, giving us the power to control wave timing and intensity. It’s expandable, too, so when things get wild later, we’re ready. Although some features are in play, you won't find them in the prototype just because of balancing for the first playtest of the game. We want the experience to eventually feel a tad unpredictable as far as enemies and when you face them, but also don't want to overwhelm the player. So you can expect a straightforward sample playthrough of basic mechanics and flow of the game for now. 

To keep the pressure rising over time, I added a global timer and hooked that into a stat ramping system. Now, enemies get stronger the longer you survive, stamina, health, damage, armor the whole works. (Currently, right now, Armor and stamina are turned off for the Prototype test, but we have some exciting plans for the future.)  This gives us the bones of a solid scaling challenge and opens the door for things like difficulty modes. The timer ends with a boss coming in who you must defeat to win the round, and we are working behind to add a large amount of additional attacks, enemies, abilities, and so much more.
Check out our design document here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1wDVwdV8qBj9P3ciOm2zlZNbcwDpwNP7u/view?usp=shari...  

All of these systems are now working together, giving Sod & Steel its first taste of real pacing and pressure. It’s alive. It’s working. And it feels good.


T minus ... the ability to survive,  literally.  
Checking spawn stats in the ramping manager.  Countdown to the boss and victory.  Dev tools make it easy for us to test issues, but it's not easy work for UX.