C.W.I.S Devlog 7 | State of the game

I'm a little late to post here as tbh I forgot that I was meant to when i rolled it out. My bad, its only a day late. Here is the latest on C.W.I.S:

So it’s been a little while since my last post and I’ve been meaning to make an update post for a few weeks now, so here it is. In my last post I went over some of the menu work and missile launcher improvements, since then I’ve been working out what is left to-do and trying to work out what I’d need to change in order to get build out, a thing that has been a goal for quite a few month’s at this point. Sadly, life has meant I’ve been rather busy in the evenings and weekends so I’ve struggled to get the time to work on the project, at least as much as I would’ve liked. Due to how near we are to 2023 and the fact that I have lost the motivation for this project that I once had, I’ll be moving on next year to new things once the first public build is done. I am committing to atleast release the arcade game mode that I planned to and to fixing any bugs that get reported for this project, but I don’t plan to continue it onwards unless it suddenly kicks off.

Some of the last three months I have been working on some of the assets, updating audio manager to 2.6.0 and releasing a much needed update to multi scene in the 0.2.1/2 updates. This took up a fair chunk of the time I would’ve had for C.W.I.S. But I have got some significant stuff done since the last update so here are the main changes:

Game settings system

One of the systems I wanted to get right from the grt go was the settings, as I wanted to be able to use it inother projects inthe future with, little to no changes needed. Atleast that was the plan, it took a bit longer than I planned as all things seem to with setting the resolution & full screen state. I did manage to figure out the resolution problem eventually but the full screen mode still proves to be an issue as of writing, I have left this bug for now to focus on the more pressing gameplay bits that I need to get working soon.

A view of the game settings screen for the video settings in the game so far.

Game save system

The old system I was using was the same slightly modified setup I used in Project Tilly. This in turn being a modified version of the public save manager asset. While this will work just fine it is really hard to debug issues with it. The new setup takes a totally new and modular approach, giving me an inspector view of the save state when needed as well as the option to add or remove values without having to reset the entire save. It works by saving the data in objects instead of the actual type & loading & saving the state from scriptable objects instead of data in code. This will likely become the framework for the next version of the save manager next year once I work out the kinks a little more, but for C.W.I.S it’ll work just fine.

The game settings in the new save setup.

Upgrades layout

The upgrades layout has changed a lot over the lifetime of the project. The new view aims to minimise the on screen space it takes up and make the systema little easier to follow. The new setup has a panel like layout with some of the upgrade types mixed together to lock some upgrades behind others of a different type. All the upgrades do now have icons that somewhat match their purpose as well. This ui is final at this point minus the weird bug when purchasing upgrades that causes the system to reset the display of purchased upgrades to appear not purchased and some of the upgrade implementations not quite working as intended. All of which will be addressed in the coming weeks.

New mechanic (system damage)

A recent development has been the turret damage mechanic. The idea being that turrets that are in sections that get hit by a missile have a change of damaging a nearby system, temporarily knocking it out of action. Damaged turret will not function fully or at all in some cases but will self repair if not hit again. If hit while damaged there is a chance the system is totally destroyed. In the event that a system is destroyed the user can still select it but none of the options will function for the rest of the game. The outline of the system will change colour and there is a UI indicator to signal the change of state to the user.

The UI showing the radar being damaged & repaired.

Radar knockout and lookouts

A new system that works into this setup is the radar lookouts. As having the radar system go down completely would be a little unfair on the user, I’ve added a close range warning system that acts like lookouts on the ship. When a missile is close by there is now some additional UI that appears to give the user some warning when a missile is close to impact. This system will work when the radar is working or not to help with aiming the C.W.I.S when at close range.

Minor bits

Some other minor bits include:

• Some backend changes to remove the multilayer code I had as it was adding complexity I didn’t need.

• Some clean up of some of the code to make it easier to manage and work with.

• Added an upgrade button to the comms array to allow the user to reduce the cooldown for supply drops.

Release date

As I’ve hinted to in this develog I am aiming to release the build before the end of the year. But understand that this may overrun in the Jan 2023. If I don’t manage to get something out by the end of Jan 2023 then I will be leaving it there as I have other projects that do need my attention that are live products. So that is the plan, but I will be pushing for the release as I would like to get a new build out if possible xD

Thats all for this post, but lots to come and hopefully really soon. Stay tuned!