UIBuzz - Software and game development

Peter: 00:00

What's up, everybody? Welcome to the UI Buzz podcast. I'm your host as always, Peter Witham. You can find me and this podcast at peterwidom.com. I have been working a lot on my game development stuff over the past well, realistically, past couple of months, certainly since the last episode.

Peter: 00:18

And they may recall the last episode, I was talking about Unity and some AI tools called Bezi, which just continues to impress me. I'm still using it. It's fantastic. It has helped me solve so many problems when I start banging my head against the wall and like, what's going on here? And it's great.

Peter: 00:36

It's like a second brain pair programming as I work on stuff. Anyway, so couple of things that I've been working on. The big one is my project hack game, which you can find at projecthack.net. There has been so much work done on this game, and it's more quality of life than it is anything else I think. I have now got the first 15 bosses set up in the game fully.

Peter: 01:04

I have built some tools in Unity that enable me to manage and add the data for those bosses a lot easier. So that's cool, especially when it comes to the numbers, and I'll get to why that's important in a minute. But I've been working on that. Just very recently, over the past few days, I've been working on some new UI changes because I knew there would be a point where I was working on the game and I was adding all the features that I wanted to put in there from my base base level requirements document, if you like. And I knew that there would be a UI problem.

Peter: 01:42

And I finally hit it. And in in this case, it's a good thing because it forced me to think about a problem I had where I wanted to have everything nice and big on the screen, but I didn't wanna have buttons everywhere. So for things like the upgrades and that pop open a new panel over the top, the UI for the upgrades themselves was fine. Figuring out where to put the buttons and make them tappable on small screen sizes. That that was a whole other story.

Peter: 02:11

So I came up with this idea. It just struck me. It was like, on a minute. This game is about hacking and it's a bit bit like an OS in many ways. So why not treat it that way with the UI?

Peter: 02:24

So what I actually did was add a new toolbar to the bottom of the game screen. And think of it as like a a dock, right, on your whatever your system is, Linux, Windows, Mac, whatever, a dock at the bottom. And you can it stays out the way, but it's very easy to get to. You tap on it. It brings up the other options, the other buttons that I wanna put in there.

Peter: 02:47

So it enables future scaling for the tools and everything else. And so right now, it's got the upgrades buttons for purchasing upgrades. And I've added another button for the very latest feature that I have added in, which is the leaderboard. And I'll talk about that now. So what that does, it takes advantage of Unity game services and it enables me to show a leaderboard for the top players.

Peter: 03:15

And you can just close that, of course, and away it goes. But the way that it works, that calculation, is part of the interesting thing here because I didn't wanna have something that's just a case of who has the most hacking power. Right? Because it's very easy to get hacking power in this game, and it goes up and down quite drastically depending on choices that you make, upgrades, and all these kind of things. Right?

Peter: 03:41

I wanted it to be flexible. So you can't just base it on that because well, ultimately, you could just continue to gain hacking power and take over the leaderboard, and nobody ever likes that. Right? So what I've done is a system that takes into account other factors. And right now, what those factors are is how much hacking power do you have and how many bosses have you successfully hacked.

Peter: 04:09

Now this will expand in the future as I'm adding in the other features that I plan to put in there and things like that. So it's very much based on a calculation rather than just a straight up who has the biggest number for whatever thing it is. Because I want it to change. I don't want anyone to be able to dominate the scoreboard. And I still haven't decided whether I'm gonna have that score board reset or whatever.

Peter: 04:35

I don't think I'm gonna reset because it won't really work because you're gonna have your hacking power and everything else. It's a continuing game. We'll see how that goes. But that's why I wanted to make it flexible, and I wanted to make it so that there was no one way to dominate the leaderboard. Right?

Peter: 04:54

Hopefully, there's no way to for one person to dominate it, but, hey. Who knows? Right? So for example, you can still get very high on the leaderboard even if you decide, you know what? I don't wanna fight bosses.

Peter: 05:08

I just wanna play other parts of the game. Okay. Great. That is still gonna work for you. So I wanted it to be very fair, and I wanted it to do it that way so that there was the opportunity for folks to play the game they wanted to, and you didn't have to follow any particular progression path.

Peter: 05:27

Because, again, I want this to be in the spirit of the game, it's a long play. Right? And I wanted it to be something that will change over time. You can change your tactics if they're not working for you, but it also can fit your play style. Now let's go back to talking about those numbers.

Peter: 05:43

The hardest thing I am working at the moment, and I always knew this was gonna be hard, is the balance of play. And what I mean by that is figuring out, right, from all the resources and all the things you can upgrade and purchase and make decisions and all of that, it's very hard to balance the gameplay because you don't want to have it so that progression is too slow for the player. So you don't want to have underpowered early things like newbie hackers and things like that. But you also don't want to overpower them so that if someone chooses, hey, I'm not going to upgrade anything. I'm just going to have whatever 20 newbie hackers.

Peter: 06:31

Right? That's gonna completely sway the calculations in the game as well. And this game balance is arguably the hardest problem I'm trying to solve right now. And I've been playing the game on my iPad for a while, obviously, and it shows me that the decisions I make drastically affect things. But I can also right now, if I continue to upgrade things obsessively, like I do with some idle games and I know other players do as well, it becomes a problem because it's gonna drop initially.

Peter: 07:10

What happens is, as you upgrade, it will drop your hacking power, but it will raise the rate at which you generate hacking power if you follow me. So this is a very difficult balance, and I don't know that I've got a good answer. The only answer I have right now is to keep playing the game for myself and figure out, okay, does this feel right? Does this feel wrong? Does there need to be some kind of curve here or some kind of intelligence system that says, okay, the more you have of the lower resources, the effect that those calculations have on your hacking power should be reduced so that it makes the player think, oh, you know what?

Peter: 07:59

I do need to upgrade some things. Right? Because I really want you to go through that upgrade process as opposed to just keeping everything at the base level. But at the same time, I don't want it so that whatever, you played the game in six months from now, you are so overpowered because you've upgraded everything and it's crazy levels. And I'm finding this the hardest thing.

Peter: 08:22

I would love to very much hear and talk with other game developers. You are more than welcome to reach out to me at peter whidom dot com forward slash contact. If you wanna come on this podcast and talk about your game development, I would love that. Because this to me is a complete mystery. And I knew this would be a problem, but it was also one I was excited to get to because it would provide me great insight into all of these other games in the style of the game that I'm creating, this project hack game, so that I can understand and appreciate the complexities involved.

Peter: 08:59

And I will say that as I continue to work on this game, it is a slow burn, very long project because it's very complicated for me, and I only have limited time. But it has greatly increased my appreciation for how hard it is to make what seems a very seemingly simple game that's based on a lot of numbers, the UI user perspective. It's incredibly complicated under the hood. So that's a lot of what I've been working on, and I would love to keep talking about this. If this interests you, again, reach out.

Peter: 09:33

Let me know. Go to peterwitham.com. You can find lots of links there and everything. But let me know because I do wanna keep talking about this and sharing these experiences. I think it is very interesting for anyone that likes to play games, is a gamer, to at some point try to make their own game.

Peter: 09:53

And I think a lot of people who play games wanna do that. And so I wanna provide these insights from my learning experiences over the years and the problems and how I solve them and things to think about and that kind of stuff. So that's what I've got for you in this update. I do have some other episodes for the podcast that I wanna do, but I wanted to specifically focus down on this. I do wanna talk about some decisions that I've made on my endless hurdles game and some other games that I'm working on and had some ideas for.

Peter: 10:26

Also, my applications. Right? I have released just recently, hopefully, the final update this year for my SubRadar app that you can find at subradar.app and finally solved all of the, I think, the cloud syncing and paywall issues and everything else. So that's feeling a lot better about that now. I'm now seeing the instant cloud sync across all my devices.

Peter: 10:50

Did a release for my Job Finder Tracker app, and I have some other apps that that I'm working on. I have ideas for. So I'm gonna be talking about all of that stuff on this, on the UI Buzz podcast. If it interests you, follow, subscribe, whatever they call it these days. And that lets me know that, okay, you know what, Peter?

Peter: 11:09

You need to get on the hook here and get off your butt and do more regular episodes because I know I've only been doing about one a month, but I have been so deep in end of year things. But I really enjoy making games and apps, and I really should talk about that more. So that's it, folks. Hope this is finding you in a good space as we get to the end of the year here. Take care of yourselves.

Peter: 11:31

I will speak to you in the next episode.