Balancing Gameplay

This past week majority of the work has been going into the research part of the game. Basically the Expand part of Build, Manage, and Expand. The challenge has always been balancing how much money you verses the cost of each item. I’m still not fully done with managing the prices with different things, but making progress!

Balancing Toilets & Food Stands

I’ve been dealing with a nightmare issue this past week. For some reason the NPCs were getting stuck after using an amenity. The problem was when an NPC was done using an amenity, they would just stay in the line. You can see that people are just standing next to the amenities even though they aren’t using it. There are 15 people in the game, and people should be distributed evenly, but they are all clumped.

I was using an array to store people in lines, but it turns out that Gamemaker doesn’t do a good job of removing a specified value from an array. So I ended up writing my own remove value from array function which fixed the problem! But this was definitely one of the most timing consuming problems because there were so many moving pieces that finding out where the exact problem was difficult.

Finally I’ve been doing some more balancing with how the difficulty curve would be as more people came into the zoo. So two examples are:

With 1000 popularity and 1 food stand and toilet, 10 people couldn’t find toilets and 1 person couldn’t find food.

With 2000 popularity and 1 food stand and toilet, 147 people couldn’t find toilets and 183 person couldn’t find food.

This is looking good because as more people are visiting your zoo, you’ll need to consider having more amenities to accommodate them. Can’t wait to showcase more of the difficulty curves for the game.

Rewards for Supporters

Over the last few days I’ve been thinking how there have been so much positive support from all of you. I was thinking of what type of rewards I could do for especially supporting me through KoFI. All of the proceeds would be going into the artwork for the game and I was thinking of having a Credits page where it shows an icon of the animal they wanted to donate towards the game. Something like below, what do you all think?