This week was my alpha demo for my game and overall it felt like it went well. Leading up to the Alpha demo I mainly focused on fixing bugs as well as a very small amount on the AI to give me a stepping stone, similar to the combat system started last week.
Last week some time was spent setting up a very basic team system that allowed the human player to attack the ai player with one unit. To actually start creating a AI that can at least gather which was my aim for my alpha demo I had to properly structure the different players in the game. First off I had to create a proper player script that defined the players resources (food, wood, population etc...) as well as their team. This allowed each player's resources to be distinguished. Once this was created I got the ai units to go to a resource node and gather.
A small bug arose during the alpha presentation where this slightly bugged out and they did not return to their town centre all the time and sometimes returned to the players. But as the alpha was expected to have bugs it was grateful this was the only bug. Therefore, since my alpha presentation a lot of improvement went into just getting the player teams even more organised. A lot of errors were occurring due to temp lists setup that would hold units and buildings of all players. To change this, on top of having each Player script defined for each player, and object also had to be created that could be used to get the Player script if wanted, or any other information that needed to be stored such as that player's units and buildings.
After updating all scripts and spending a lot of time following through the code to make sure it is using the correct lists and not temp ones it started working. Once this small section was done I felt more comfortable that my game was at an Alpha point so I actually asked two people to test my game. After watching them play and try different things I learnt a lot. Most of the problems that came up will be fixed later down the line, as the testers got confused between friendly units and enemy units. As well as it is unclear if a worker is idle unless a unit is selected. Both these problems should be addressed further down the line when some better graphics can hopefully be added. As the animations can help show what a worker is doing (for example, if they are idle they are just stood there, and if they are gathering they are doing something different). Having proper models will also fix the unit confusion. As currently all units look the same, and to tell the different between units (worker, archer and swordsman) are colours. In the final game each unit will have a model to look different, and each team will have a different colour.
There were other things spotted during the test that have been addressed. First was another list error with the new player setup where it wasn't calculating the units currently being trained properly which led to the testers going over their max population. Another concern was about the camera control. The testers played within the unity editor experienced problems navigating the camera due to the screen limit size and the mouse going off of the screen and not moving the camera. This is just unfortunate but it has made me add additional controls allowing the arrow keys to move the camera up down left and right. This is also another general RTS mechanic that needed to be added at some point. One additional feature needs to be added to prevent the camera from going off the terrain. As a temporary solution the player can hit the space key to reset the cameras position in the centre of the world.
Currently at this point my game is getting to the point of having a lot of mechanics working, but also a lot of small bugs to them. I spent the past week working on fixing some of these bugs, but more time being spent on that is decreasing the time on two big mechanics which are the combat and a proper AI opponent. So hopefully the next week brings more development into these two areas.
