Key Wave System

Early in development of the Wave Defense game mode we used a simple equation to scale the difficulty of oncoming waves each round. While this was somewhat effective at increasing the difficulty, it couldn’t control the composition of each wave, only the quantity of enemies. This quickly led to both performance and balancing issues.

To remedy this, I came up with the Key Wave system. The intent of the Key Wave system was to allow a greater degree of designer control over each wave without needing to actually set values for every possible wave the player would face. Taking inspiration from Key Frames in animation, the Key Wave system works by interpolating wave data between the previous Key Wave and the next one. This allowed me to accurately adjust not only the overall quantity of enemies, but also the odds of each enemy spawning, how much that enemy would subtract from the wave’s budget, and if the amount of a particular enemy should be multiplied.

I also created a spreadsheet to accompany the Key Waves system for the sake of balancing. This spreadsheet contained all of the necessary values for each Key Wave ready to be imported directly into the game. In order to help ensure that each Key Wave was properly balanced I also created a full simulation of our enemy spawning system in the spreadsheet. This helped me visualize the likelihood of each enemy spawning in each Key Wave, as well as estimates for the total amounts of each enemy that would be spawned and how quickly they would be able to capture each of the objectives the player is tasked with defending.