Wake Up Devlog Week 20

This week was dedicated to acting on the user feedback from the first playtesting session, as well as adding a new Player class.

Based on the feedback that the ‘High Gunner’ enemy was far too overwhelming t fight, I reduced its HP and Base Damage values to make them more manageable, and removed a couple of their spawn points from one of the rooms, as they would melt the Player’s health and be able to survive for too long.

Something else I inferred from the Playtesting is that none of the three playtesters reached the boss (not including an extra tester who Played the build shortly after this). I want at least reaching the first boss to not be too challenging, so I reduced the amount of combat encounters required to reach the first boss from 5 to 3.

Finally, I added some more explanation for some of the Game’s mechanics / systems. I added some text to the room selection screen, explaining briefly how weighting the chance of each room works, and added to the Gameplay UI, displaying the current enemy level, which means that Players can figure out the enemies are getting stronger after every encounter for themself without a lengthy tutorial.

After making these improvements, I decided I wanted to add a final Player Class to the Game, and one that plays differently to the other two.

Watching people play the game, I noticed that people would tend to fight enemies at a distance if they could, so I thought it would shake things up to add a class that rewards risky up-close combat.

This was the founding principle I created the ‘Bearer of Ambition’ class off of. Their primary fire deals more damage the closer to your target you are, and their other abilities are all about controlling the positioning of yourself and enemies.

Their secondary ability teleports them a moderate distance in the direction they are facing, allowing for quick engagement and disengagement.

Their utility ability creates a current of force in the direction they are facing which deals a small amount of damage and pulls enemies towards the Player; a useful tool for pulling an enemy close to quickly finish them off with a close-range primary.

Their special ability creates a bubble of force around the Player which deals moderate damage and pushes enemies away. This special ability can be useful to make space between the Player and enemies, or to finish off a group of low-health enemies.

The Bearer of Ambition can output massive damage with their primary fire, but only when the Player puts themself in a vulnerable position; this class is high risk and high reward, and rewards more skilled Players.

To add some more feedback to the Player, I added a low HP screen- a red outline with a semi-transparent red filter over the rest of the screen, which would throb from transparent to opaque continuously while the player is on low health.

The rest of this week was dedicated to implementing Wwise into the Project. I’m lucky that my partner has knowledge of Wwise and composition, so I have been able to get their help with the audio from this project.

Whenever I have used Wwise there have been various issues, and this project has been no exception. At first, I was not using a persistent object dedicated to playing audio, which caused issue with music not transitioning properly- however rectifying this error on my end fixed the issue- however, the audio Player blueprint needs to be recompiled every time I reopen the Unreal Project for the transitions to work properly, which is quite a nuisance.

Finally for this week, I spent a decent bit of time fixing the trajectory for the Bearer of Ambition’s utility ability so that it would follow both the pitch and yaw of the Player’s look direction.

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