Next update in the works

I'm working on the v0.8 update and it's taking longer than a week this time. Maybe I bit off too big of a bite. After the last update that included character upgrades, you can quickly turn your character into an OP cash cow and make all aspects of the game "too easy". I know that I need to add a lot more content, but I also need to find ways to make the existing content more interesting and challenging.

I decided that I wanted to give the enemies different behaviors than just "run at the player constantly". For that I wanted to use a Behavior Tree system. I have some assets like NodeCanvas, and I've also coded my own before, but for this I wanted to use more of a drop in solution. NodeCanvas would be, but it's visual and for whatever reason that doesn't flow as well with me as code does. In the end I decided to give FluidBT a try. It's a pretty straightforward code way to build different BTs, one tradeoff though over NodeCanvas that I'm a little sad about is that I don't get to use ScriptableObject assets to store behaviors (so that I could just slot them into a single prefab or variant). There *are* ways of reusing behavior code but so far I haven't tried to do that yet. So far I have replaced the basic follow behavior, and also created a behavior for ranged attacks. Some enemies can now stop and shoot a projectile at the player when they are in range. I plan to add more complex behaviors for other neat things like maybe a Necromancer that can summon skeletons, bosses, and maybe even some leader / follower stuff.

Another thing that I've been working on is a bit of developer quality of life stuff. I am using ScriptableObject data assets for most things, but I need a good way to look at multiple at once so that I can start to try to balance them. I had been thinking about putting all the values for the enemies health and speed, etc into a spreadsheet so that I could do that, but then I would have to maintain 2 sources of truth. I could have also I suppose written some script to import the data from a spreadsheet or CSV and let that be the source of truth. Instead I built a custom editor window that will show them like a spreadsheet.

Also I had previously just spawned all enemies somewhere outside the viewport. Now I want to have specific spawn points on the map. The enemies are still ignoring all walls, but at least they won't spawn outside the map bounds anymore. I did this mainly because I'm also adding a new map, and on this new map I wanted to have very specific places that mobs can spawn. I was just going to use a transform for the spawn point, but ended up creating a separate monobehaviour with a bunch of extra features (just in case) so that I could render custom gizmos for them. Otherwise it was too much of a pain to see where they were on the map.

Also because of the new map, I now needed a way to choose which map you were going to play. The UI is still kind of a work in progress, but it's functional now. At some point I'm going to start on "Story Mode" and then this type of game selection will likely be for "Timed Challenges" only, going through different maps and characters that you've unlocked by playing the story, but for now this will work.

The new map is bringing a lot of other *needs* online as well. I'm adding several new mobs and at least one more player character. I've had to completely rework my wave system as well. Previously I could define waves and what types of enemies they would spawn, but they would change every minute. Now I have the ability to set a start and stop time for each wave, what types of mobs it should spawn (as before), whether or not the wave should spawn at the same time as other waves, and whether or not it should be restricted to specific spawn points. 

All that and I've also fixed a number of bugs and have a few more surprises  in store. I've got the core functionality in place for all of these changes, but I still need to update all the content and test and tweak things a bit before the update will be "ready". I don't know how many people are champing at the bit for a new update besides my son, but I want to make sure that everything I release is in good shape. It might not be until next weekend at this rate, but it *is* coming, so hang tight :D