After having discussions with people about the implementation of the asteroid pattern system, which determines what asteroids should spawn and where, I found that utilising a hard-coded array is not very efficient for quickly changing the numbers to find a good balance of difficulty. This ability to quickly change these values, and even give playtesters the ability to do so, is especially important right now, as most people who have been playing the game have found it too hard.

Therefore, I spent some time implementing a new system where the patterns are game objects within Unity. They are each clones of a prefab object, which I created first, that has slots for all of the information needed for the pattern; so the developer can easily fill in this info for whatever pattern they need, within the Unity engine. The screenshot below shows where this info can be added, and how flexible it is.

The code can then randomly pick from these patterns, which are stored in a public array that can be accessed and edited within the engine, whenever it needs to select a new pattern. As they are generated from my prefab, the script reading the pattern understands the exact format that the info is in, so there is no confusion.