Director and Gameplay Loop Answers

118. One easy way to fix problems like these in general is to cap the amount of times the while loop can run for. So we can introduce a variable called runs which starts at 0 and goes up by 1 with every iteration of the while loop. If it reaches a certain value, like say 1000, then we'll exit out of the loop no matter if the other condition has been met or not. This looks like this:

 
function Director:setEnemySpawnsForThisRound()
    ...
  
    -- Find enemies
    local runs = 0
    local enemy_list = {}
    while points > 0 and runs < 1000 do
        ...
        runs = runs + 1
    end
  
    ...
end

For the purposes of this game, 1000 is a good number because it's unlikely that we'll run this while loop 1000 times naturally, so it must be the case that if it gets that high then it's stuck in a situation like the one described in the question.