Disasters Come to Life & Dev Shortcuts
Week three, and the disasters finally do their job. Amanda and I knocked out everything on our list over the last couple of days — and I built one small thing I should have done from day one that's already making development faster.
Disasters you can place
Last week the dice rolled and told you which disaster you got, but you couldn't actually use it. Now you can. Roll the dice, get your disaster and its percentage, then place it on the board and point it in a direction — and it plays out. The earthquake, for example, expands through its quake zone and wipes out everyone caught inside, with the population vanishing as it spreads.
Making it feel like something
There's a particle system on the destruction now, plus screen shake. I still need to dial in the timing so it lands right, but you get the gist — rolling a disaster now has real weight and consequence on the board instead of just being a number.
A dev-workflow win
Testing one specific disaster meant re-rolling the dice over and over until the one I wanted came up — a huge time sink. So I finally added keyboard shortcuts: keys 1–4 fire each of the four disasters directly (volcano, earthquake, storm and one more) at a set strength, so I can test the exact effect instantly. Small change, big speed-up — the kind of thing worth building in early.
Next up
New devlogs every Friday. The full episode is above, and the complete transcript is below.
Full transcript
Hey, welcome to dev log number three. And, gosh, just seeing the last couple days. Amanda and I were working on the game, and we accomplished a ton. So everything that we had had on our list to get accomplished. Yesterday and today we did. And it has turned out really great.
And I did a couple things that I think helped me in the long run, be a little bit faster at my development and something I should have built in at the very beginning. But anyway, let's take a look at where the game is now. And I'm gonna go ahead and hit play. And it's great because, what we're able to get accomplished was, I have I set up, you know, people on the board right now. This probably going to change, but just, empty prefabs or prefabs that are representing the people on the grid. And I am able to go ahead and roll my dice.
Of course, you know, they they, give me a disaster and a percent. And this is going to be an earthquake. And so now I have the disasters actually being able to be placed on the board. Last week I didn't have the disasters at all. Now I have the disasters and you can actually place them and they actually do their job. So we're going to have earthquake and it's going to kill 100% of the people that are inside of, its, its range.
So I'm going to go continue. So now I can place and then once I place that, I give it a direction that it will go. Now I need to take that arrow off. And if I forgot to do that. But, the earthquake will expand out and it'll kill everybody within its, its quake zone. And so we have that kind of splitting out, and you can see that the people are going away that were in that spot.
We got a nice little, particle system and, I need to figure out the timing on my, feel the screen shake and stuff, but, you get the the gist. There. And then one of the problems that I was having was that, you know, I wanted to work on maybe the storm, and I was having to to hit the dice over and over and over again until I got the storm to then see how it was working and doing the thing that I wanted it to do. And that was kind of silly, because that was eating up a ton of time. And so, I didn't do that until later today, when I was pretty much done with everything. I was like, you know, it would be smart if I just put in shortcuts for this.
And so I went ahead and did that now. So, I'm using the keys one, two, three, four for the four disasters that we have currently. So I'll just show you the four disasters. Four disasters. So I don't have to roll. So one is my volcano, and I just set the strength to 80%.
So kill 80% of the people that are inside of its its range. So here is the, volcano. And we got the particle effects all working. Yeah. It's, turned out pretty good so far. And we'll we'll spend a lot of time on Polish later.
So that's the, volcano. Let me show the storm. So here we can place where the storm is going to go, and I choose the direction that the storm is going to go, and I let it go. Now, you can see I've got the storm. It's got rain. It's got, its built off particle system.
There's some lightning in there and again, it's killing, you know, as it's, Collider is going across, it's killing the, specified percentage of people within its range. And then, I've already shown the earthquake. And then the other thing we have is the tornado. And I love this one. This is so fun. Anyway, so I placed my tornado, and I think I want to get rid of the arrow that's right underneath the tornado.
But I have, a range here that the tornado and I set up, some noise so that it's going to change the direction of the tornado based off of, different parameters that I set up and the speed of the tornado. Anyway, so let's see if the tornado in action, so I am going to set it off. Going down this way. So we got a little particle system that's, you know, spinning stuff across. And you can see it's destroying stuff on the board. Yeah.
There we go. So we have four disasters. They're all working. They're placeable. they're doing their thing. And so that is what we were able to accomplish over yesterday and today.
And it's just so fun and exciting. And I'm having so much fun, making this game. So next week, hopefully we're going to start working on doing some generative stuff. I want to generate the people on the board. And I think the idea is that we're going to have, pick one of the tiles where people are going to start populating the, earth, I guess, and then after every disaster, then the population is going to continue to grow and expand out. So I have I need to figure out exactly how I want to approach that.
I want to be able to have the the people move around on the board and all kinds of different stuff. But I need to start thinking about generation. Of game objects. So that is what we accomplished this week. And it's really, really fun so far. And that is where we're at.
And just, you know, just note put shortcuts in your game. So when you're developing, the, things will go faster as you're testing. I didn't do that until after the end of the day, but anyway. All right, that is devlog 3, peace.