Storm the Core Dev #5
waveSystem 2.0 is now finally working!
I can't believe how much time I spent on this system. I don't even get paid for this.
While I was working on the system, I added some visual and audio assets to actually make it feel more like a game.
I've also went to go find some people to try and playtest the game since I don't think I'm going to develop the game further any time soon.
The feedback received from the playtesters were very useful. Some players found the waves of enemies in the new waveSystem 2.0 to be too difficult (I'm just that good ig). Others noted how the enemies weren't behaving very dynamically and were predictable (fair, the AI hasn't really been modified to do much other than act in a swarm and fire at the player within a certain angle of them looking at the player). Feedback like this allows developers to be able to make meaningful changes, especially for issues that the devs wouldn't be able to find by themselves. External feedback is extremely important guys.
See the video for a small example. The project is starting to look more like a game now.
Postmortem reflection:
One aspect I would definitely change about the prototype’s development process is how late I implemented difficulty balancing and feedback testing. Had I set up some baseline balancing early on, a lot of the later stress and debugging (especially around budget scaling and batch spawning) could’ve been avoided. I was too deep into writing custom spawn logic before properly playtesting wave-to-wave pacing, and it came back to bite me.
If I were to revisit the design side, I’d rework enemy variety and wave pacing based on player location on the star map. Right now, waves scale in difficulty, but they aren’t responsive to what sector you’re in. I think tying spawn batches and AI aggression to the environmental context of each arm of the galaxy would’ve created more interesting moment-to-moment decisions for the player. This is something touched on during class: how systems and aesthetics can reinforce setting and narrative. I didn’t really follow through on that part.
External feedback was probably the most valuable part of this whole dev cycle. Developers might never notice what feels unfair or flat until someone else tries your game comments on these things.
The game’s finally starting to look and feel like an actual thing, and I’m proud of what I’ve learned even if I never take it further.















