CAGD 377 - Blog Post 5
- Els Fouche
- Nov 6, 2025
- 3 min read
Plague Break
Plague Break is a match 3 game with combat and roguelite elements where you play as a survivor struggling against the zombie hoard. Creating matches allows you to damage enemies; special tiles can be mixed into a match to do bonus damage or to heal yourself. Managing your board state carefully is critical to your survival.
Feedback
During this sprint we emphasized the addition of key feedback features in order to improve the user experience as well as the long-overdue implementation of a core system. The goal of improving feedback was actualized via the addition of code for handling audio and tactile feedback.
Apologies for sharing a code snippet. In this case I could not determine an effective way to share the vibration feedback feature. The code accesses the Android API for vibration functionality with compiler directives to prevent attempting to access the API if the device is not compatible. Different vibration lengths are used for basic touches versus e.g. when the player receives damage.
The video above demonstrates the bare-bones audio implementation. You'll note that there's some clipping occurring during scene transitions. This is due to the audio source being destroyed prior to finishing playing the audio. This is considered a low priority issue and will be addressed as time allows.
Audio has now been implemented for when the player makes a match, when they take damage, when they deal damage (which occurs simultaneously with creating a match), and when they die. All audio elements respect the volume slider in the settings menu.
Progression
The core system mentioned above refers to the level progression mechanic. Prior to this sprint players were able to select any level from the level select screen. This was never intended behavior for the game but was considered lower priority. However, it jumped up the priority list due to the persistent data and 'no backtracking' functionality that was implemented. As players completed levels they became unable to select them again which eventually locked them out of playing the game when no more levels were available.
As one might expect, it's not desirable for a player to become literally unable to play the game anymore. In order to resolve this it proved necessary to completely invert the level lockout code. Before, levels would add themselves to a set of completed levels tracked in the save file and all buttons associated with those completed levels would become inaccessible upon loading the level select screen.
As shown above the player now begins with the first level available and subsequent levels are added as they progress while previously completed levels are locked out. On completing the final level progress is reset, allowing the player to play as much as they'd like. This means that the check no longer locks out all the level buttons in the completed list, instead locking out everything that's not in the 'available' list.
In addition to the level progression elements, this sprint also saw the implementation of improved power-up progression. Specifically, the UI has been upgraded and the player may now unlock an unlimited number of upgrades for each upgrade the designer has marked as 'infinite'.
The power-ups increase in price each time they're selected. There is a minor graphical bug with the UI - when a player returns to the upgrade shop after purchasing upgrades the progress bar does not update to the correct colors. This is high on my 'polishing' priority list and will likely be addressed in either this upcoming sprint or the next.
Issues
Old Issues
None
New Issues
Issue #11: Upgrade progress bars in the crystal shop don't update properly when exiting and re-entering.
This is a purely visual bug and will be addressed during polishing.
Issue #12: Some audio elements are not modified based on the volume setting.
This issue is due to the addition of audio by other developers and will be handled by an additional script this coming sprint.
Issue #13: Some audio has clipping due to scene transitions interrupting it.
This is another issue that will be pushed back until we begin polishing.
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