Hi everyone,
Considering I was explaining the new tutorial only yesterday, I will take another post to talk about some of the “lessons learnt” from creating the tutorial (which frankly are also a lot of lessons learnt from 0.8).
First of all, I had started redoing the tutorial thinking it was going to be a quick upgrade, but as every time before I had to realise that upgrading the tutorial is a considerable amount of work. This also applies to 0.8 - I recently took stock of all of the changes that have happened since 0.7, which can only be considered a massive scope creep from what I envisioned would be in 0.8. Adding maps led to adding different soldiers. Improving pirate’s peak led to major changes in balancing, etc. From this point on, I will try to keep things a little more contained to themes, and will try to build each part realising that it will probably end up being a much bigger undertaking.
Secondly, on to the smaller things: As I had mentioned before, I have come to very much regret any quick additions or fixes I had put in place for the tutorial while creating it. Between the various issues it caused with the other systems of the game, and the lack of any benefits created by them in the latter part of the tutorial, this “tech debt” really wasn’t doing me any favours. Re-enabling just the ammo purchasing, for example, turned into a relatively big undertaking, considering how “quick and dirty” I had disabled purchasing previously.
Thirdly, I really need to update my debugging statements. The majority of the debugging statements had been put in place as a result of looking for specific bugs - but this means that many of them are not particularly useful when trying to find a new bug that has just occurred in someone else’s game. Once 0.8 has been finalised, I’ll take a few days to update my code to more sensibly provide me with log data, which should help get better control of the sheer size that this project has become.
Finally, I very much enjoy the guidance given by the tutorial to get to the final goal of destroying the pirates. Even though I am not planning on adding substantial quests to the game before 0.10, I may add a limited amount of intermediate quests to the game for 0.9. Having more manageable steps that can be achieved every hour or so should really help break up the otherwise very long-winded final goal in Pirate’s Peak.
Until next week!