This week's changes/improvements:
- Added hyperdrive model into the intro scene and end scene of game
- Completely redid the end scene-- hyperdrive now flies to the winning ship and the winning ship flies out of the screen as the losing players get crushed by a sea of asteroids
- Changed the signifier of the invincibility power-up to be a shield instead of a star
- Added new meshes from our artist to ships and asteroids
- Made the blocking mechanic more forgiving and easier to use
- Changed the end scoreboard into an easy to read table coordinated by color
- Added all credits for external assets to the credits game page
- Added dialogue for the score ship at the beginning of the game (it now says "bring me coins" at the start)
- Decreased the size of the controls text in the main scene
- Adjusted title text size and credits text size to scale with screen size
- Fixed bugs where players could be killed when they where supposed to have invincible respawn shield
- Fixed bug where parallax wasn't working on readyUp screen in build
- Changed particles when players score to match player colors
- Updated scoreboard to have correct values for stats like shots deflected
- Altered in-game music to be original content from our collaborative musician
- Removed button to exit game on title screen (for purposes of game showcase on 12/11/18)
- Added tilted models of the player ships into the title screen
This is our final development release for Escape to Hyperspace. We were faced with a critical game-loop error during playtesting last week where the end scene would not play and the game could not be restarted. In order to fix this we completely redid the dramatic end scene to make it abundantly clear who the winner of the game was. The winner receives the hyperdrive and proceeds to fly towards the camera while the rest of the players are crushed by a barrage of asteroids. We finally received meshes and materials from our collaborative artist, which gave our ships more depth and a more polished feel. Our collaborative musician also provided us with new, original music as a soundtrack for the game.
Many of the other changes we made were to add polish to our game. We will be presenting our game with our classmates on the University of Michigan campus on the night of December 11th, and some of the changes, like removing the exit game functionality, are not viable for a market game but are wise choices for giving game testers an enjoyable experience at the showcase. We also created a final trailer for this showcase using gameplay video from this build, which ate into our development time this week. We are proud of what we've accomplished and how far we've come in the development of this game over the past few months and hope people enjoy it!
