This Week's Work:

I made more progress with balancing the flow/pacing of an average run, and I think it's at a pretty good spot now. Originally we had visions of each run lasting 20-30 minutes, but I think we just don't have the content to support that at the moment, so I tried to focus on getting the difficulty to ramp up slowly but consistently over the course of a run. Initially, the game reached its max spawn-rate pretty quickly, and since you can only hold 3 crystals at a time, the game became pretty stagnant (either you were strong enough to survive, or you weren't). To remedy this, I added more tiers of spawn rates, which trigger based on how many kills the player has.

Beforehand, there were only a few different levels of spawn rate, so adding more definitely changed the pacing of the runs.

As for bug-fixing, the laser synergy that I implemented a few weeks ago was using the wrong material in the LineRenderer, which made it appear as a bright-pink line instead of using the lightning texture. Fixing this took way too long, but it was actually a very easy fix that I just kept overlooking. We have a serialized Material variable in our synergies script that is used to set the material of the LineRenderer, and I kept setting the variable in the default version of the script, instead of the version that was instantiated within our GameManager, so I wasn't actually changing the version that was being used. Luckily I eventually realized my mistake. Other than that, there were some z-axis issues that needed adjustment, because it was pretty common for the laser to just go through the floor and appear to stop short.

I just made sure that the end position's z value gets set to 0, and there are no more problems. Now instead of looking like a random missing texture, it looks like this:

Going Forward:

Our goal is to start taking people off of the project within the next couple of weeks, since the semester is coming to an end and we've released on Steam already. My plan is to get another sprint's worth of tasks from our producer, and then finish off my work on Ciros with that.