The perfect balance is probably impossible, but let’s try to achieve it!
I had a pretty productive week so once! All of the previous tasks that I mentioned probably 3 weeks ago are done, the Level Editor was updated and fixed as I used it, Act 9 levels are balanced... as the whole game as well!
But let's break it down:
Intro: I was tired of *waiting my musical artist to come and give me pointers how to polish the intro scene, so I just did it myself! All slight visual glitches are removed, all SFX levels adjusted to all scenes, some even replaced, or edited. As a whole I consider the Intro scene done!
Main Menu: Small changes to the visual style of the menu, added the current ship class and level above the "Upgrades" option too. But most importantly the first time you are starting the story mode I'm showing the intro scene first (skippable of course) .
Level Balance: There is no chance I can manage to achieve perfect balance in all systems of the game, but I known for sure that I had pretty wild swings in the total level HP of the enemies through the levels
So I've started by creating a real-time graph that represents the cumulative HP/credits of each enemy in each level in the whole game, then added a smaller ones that represents only the current selected Act (in the Mission Select panel) - This gave me pretty good idea how messed up the HP curve was...
Then finally moved the BOSS general data (HP, credits, and so on) in the Enemies constant where they are easily accessible
And then level by level, act by act I’ve started adjusting the enemy type HP and credit drops (when needed), but mostly edited the levels directly. I’ve probably changed 80% of the level layouts in this one week!
In the end I have properly balanced the 90% of the levels (as they are 9 of 10 acts ready) as you can clearly see in the screenshot! This real-time graph, and the visual level editor helped tremendously! If I was editing the levels by hand (by changing numbers in array) this would take probably couple of weeks, if not longer.
I still need to check if the calculated credits drops are close to the real game (by just playing through few acts and taking notes), and with that I can make the final adjustments for the credits balance.