Relentless Waves Work (May 30 2025)

A lot of this week was spent rewriting code for Relentless Waves. First I updated the translator to work with spreadsheets. In theory if someone wanted to translate the game, I was going to give them a txt file that listed all the things they had to write. But I realized a better way to do that is to give them a link to a spreadsheet (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/19CiC2QT3GX_mW_-fsajqhnjdXPyRAB7rgwfp4-efBxQ/edit?gid=0#gid=0) that they can edit. They can create their own column and add their own language. It’s also nice that the original English text will be there as well. When I did this I deleted the code I had for the original txt file, but decided to add it back in anyways. The code can handle the language field for both txt and spreadsheet, it’s fine.

I think I’m also going to change the scoring for the game. Originally your score was just the highest difficulty you beat the game at, and it listed the amount of bullets you missed + damage you took. It wasn’t the greatest but it was ok for a game with only one level. If I’m adding more levels and optional challenges though, it needs to handle that as well. Now the scoring formula is: [difficulty] * 100 - missed bullets - damage taken. If any challenges are enabled (like the one where you have to juggle balls), those will add 10 to your score. And the game will keep track of your high score for every level.

I haven’t actually added any levels, but I made the process of making levels easier. I rewrote the code to generate specific enemies in preset positions. One annoying part of Unity is that if you have a list of lists, it won’t show up in the inspector for you to edit. Instead I had to create 3 different classes to make this work. I have a class called Level, which just has a list of Waves. A Wave just has a list of Collections, and a Collection contains variables for an enemy and their spawn position (if the variable for the enemy is left blank, the game picks a random one). Three different classes, with no lines of code in any of them, just to allow direct editing in the inspector.

I’ve also recently started thinking about art descriptions. Basically, if I had an artist, what would I have to tell them to draw art for a game like Randomly Generated RPG. There are some character arts where I have a clear visual for what I’d like, and others where I’m ok with letting the artist come up with what they want for it. Now since there are 30 different characters, and they can be either Neutral/Happy/Angry/Sad, and Grounded/Elevated. If I force the artist to make different art for each character in all those states, they would have to make 240 pieces of art, which is super not happening. Another thing I’ve learned from Dominion’s art is that for human characters, you’re required to specify things like gender, age, and race, or else the artist will default to doing the same thing for every character. Which means I’ll have to go and preselect all those things for all the human characters.