Blog Post 4

 

Robo Factory

Blog Post 4

Kade Chambers

Jen Davalos

Liam O'Hare

    The past couple weeks has been hectic as we worked to finalize our design and incorporate the feedback that we had received from our playtesters. This sprint was to be the final push to finish all systems that would be present in the game so that our team would have enough time during the final sprint to work out remaining bugs and balance the progression. For this sprint, I was assigned to set up the UI buttons and menu to work with our upgrade script and scriptable objects. I then took a look at our feedback data and worked to balance the current upgrades. My final and largest task was reworking the core upgrade system to allow for a tiered upgrade system that would allow the player to upgrade their factory depending on the number of upgrades purchased.

    

    Starting with my work done on our upgrade menu UI, I needed to rework the text being displayed to work with TextMeshPro text objects. We found during playtests that users were seeing the text as slightly blurry, which was an issue that can be found in Unity's base Canvas Text object when the text is scaled too small (this is a mobile game after all). Since our buttons are constructed at runtime with a script, Liam set the prefab of the button up with the new art assets while I worked the imported text into the scripts to work with the prefab. This change has really brought a level of polish to our game and brightens the visuals dramatically.

    Once I got the upgrades working again, I noticed that the menu felt clunky for how pretty it looked, so I worked on adding elasticity to the button scrolling, so that the player had a satisfying effect of the buttons stretching back into their correct place. To accomplish this, I used the Unity Scroll Rect component and experimented with the menu's prefab until it felt right on the phone.

    

    Moving forward, I needed to adjust the upgrades to work better over a longer period of time. This meant speeding up the progression early for more rewarding play, as well as slowing down the progression at later times to lengthen the end of each stage/factory. We were noticing that conveyors were starting way too slow but were way too fast after a short period of time. By introducing upgrade tiers and incorporating scaling cost (gold cost), we were able to lengthen gameplay for players in each factory. To put a feather in this task, I needed a way to track the progression and earned gold for the player. To do this, I used PlayerPrefs to add persistent data that could track gold, and each upgrade tier allowing for easy load and play at any time.

    Finally, I have been hard at work getting our upgrade systems bugs ironed out for the full release of Robo Factory. This involves fixing collision issues as they arise with our parts as we tweak them, and I'm happy to say that we are finally getting near the end. I am incredibly proud of the work that my team has done during this semester. I have a truly talented team and can't wait to get the full game into your hands.