Freshly Squeezed Progress Report – Now Separating Two Bad Toys at Once

In the previous sprint’s report, I made it clearer how much a toy is worth when you ship it, and I spent time designing and thinking about some aspects of the game’s levels and UI.

This past sprint I focused on changing the way the Strong Worker behaves.

Sprint 40: Training levels

Planned and Completed:

• Make strong worker able to work on two toys at once

Planned and Incomplete:

• Show tooltips during game based on triggers
• Create floor training levels/tutorial

There was a lot going on at the day job as I wrapped up a project there, so I once again didn’t put in as much time on this project as I would have liked.

As I mentioned a few sprints ago, I realized that the Strong Worker wasn’t as valuable as hiring two Normal Workers. I could try to tweak the hiring costs to balance things, but then the Strong Worker would be merely a variation on the Normal Worker, which did not feel very interesting at all.

So I decided to enhance the Strong Worker by giving them the ability to separate two Bad Toys at the same time.

And it turned out to be a bit more complex than initially anticipated, even though I spent a bit of time anticipating.

Originally toys knew if they were held by a worker, but they didn’t know whether they were being crafted or separated. Workers didn’t know about the toys they held, but they knew if they were crafting or separating. And somehow this worked fine.

But now workers had a capacity for how many Bad Toys they could separate, which meant they needed to know what toys they were holding at once. And rendering the toys required knowing if they were being held by a worker who was holding another toy so that they toys would be offset from each other.

And I noticed that when the worker threw both toys at the inventory that you couldn’t easily see it, so I added variations to the arcs of the throws.

And then I had to fix the problems I introduced in which toys would disappear if they were technically still considered “held by” a worker who didn’t think they were working on any toys resulting in messed up math.

But in the end, it looks relatively good, and now I can see how much impact on the balance of the game there is to have a Strong worker who can do the job of potentially two Normal Workers.

Which of course got me thinking about what could make the third worker special and unique.

Thanks for reading!

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