Hey Keepers!

thank you for the feedback regarding problems with the waves. In the Assessor update, we changed a bit how waves were generated, and that magnified a bug that always existed. A bit of insight :)

Wave Designer

The Wave Designer, one of many tools we made to make dome. That's a small tool i built to help create snippets.

Snippets

Snippets are small sequences of monsters. The intention of having them was to combine pre-designed challenges with procedurally generated waves. Tasked with generating a wave, the wave generator would then look at all valid snippets, and combine them freely until the desired wave strength was reached. You can see that a monster either spawns left or right. Randomly, the whole snippet could also be flipped, to spawn on the other sides.

Do we even need snippets?

In the last update, i removed all snippets except for single monster ones. With the stingray, it suddenly did not make sense to have all these premade flyer snippets - instead we'd need a stronger system to support "one of those" as a placeholder, like "use a tier 1 flying monster". Before doing that, i wondered if the snippet system was actually beneficial, or if not having it would feel any different. You see, this is complexity, and avoiding complexity is usually great. There are many risks in there too, like some monster appearing overproportionally often, because they are in many snippets. This gets harder and harder to balance the more monsters we have. Because of this, i decided to remove all snippets and only keep single monster ones. So the most basic setup. Divers didn't appear as a single snippet, so i accidentally culled them too.

The Bug

Remember i wrote that snippets could be flipped? What happened here is that flipping a snippet would cause every occurance of that snippet to be flipped. This is a bug - each snippet should be flipped or not flipped individually. Before, this was not very obvious, as every monster appeared in various snippets. But now with only one snippet per monster, it meant that all monsters of the same type would come from the same side. Very bad. Especially if you suddenly have 7 drillers coming from the same side.
That's not right.

Fixed

It's an easy fix, just making all used snippets independent of each other (separate instances). But it shows well how bad complexity can be - in this case, it hid this bug that was always causing some obscure shenanigans. If you saw very strange waves that were lopsided, like 5 ticks coming from the same side, it might have been this bug. It can still happen now, which is also ok, but less often and we also know why it happens.

v2.0.15

• fixed monsters of the same type only coming from the same direction within a wave.
• less lopsided waves - some of it is ok and interesting, but it's a bit less random now
• divers will spawn again
• fixed rare crash when starting a new game or loading an old save

I recently wrote a small post on the Assessor feedback, for which we are very thankful! https://steamcommunity.com/app/1637320/discussions/0/3547176090237501720/ Hotifxes always have a chance to break some things, so please tell if you notice something being very off. Have fun! https://store.steampowered.com/app/1637320/Dome_Keeper/

[ 2022-11-20 10:43:37 CET ] [ Original post ]