What's New?
In the last week, we made effort in tuning parameters, changing game background and selection page, and adding some new functionality to weapon and shield. The updates in our polish version are listed as follow:
- Redesign the game scene background - it is dynamic now!
- Redesign and re-implement the shield functionality. Now the shield can automatic defend for your team!
- Change the character selection page to a ready page - no character selection in this version
- Tune parameter (e.g. player speed, cd time of shield, damage of shooting and ramming)
- By tuning parameter, we make the game longer (around 2 min per round)
- Change the ladder sprite
- Change the game title in main menu page
- Add a "Station Change" pop-up when stations are about to change
- Add laser cannon mechanism - Every time you get hit, you got some "angry points", when you are super angry - hit your foe with strong laser cannon for the revenge!
- Speed up victory animation
- Bug fixing
What's the Motivation?
We would like to have you discuss with us on how to improve our game! To share our opinion, we listed the motivation on why we made these changes here. Note that each bullet point corresponds to a point in the 'what's new' section:
- Originally the background is repeated and midground is fixed, which makes the terrain look boring and lack professionalism. We redesign the background, use a dynamic midground and adds moving school and bubbles in the background to solve this.
- Some people think the shield is not useful and do not use the shield often. We changed the shield to automatically turning directions to make it easier to use. We think this can help people utilize shield more.
- Selecting characters on showcase is not a good idea since people do not know what characters will be in the same team. We eliminated the selection to reduce confusion and decided to put the controllers together to indicate teams. We also added a pre-ready image for characters to tell players which character they are playing.
- The balance of the game was not very good. The submarine health was too low, causing the game to end too quickly. The cd time of shield is too often and shooting bullets was not very rewarding. These causes people to heavily lean towards ramming to beat the other team. We tuned the parameters to reach a better balance between functionalities.
- The game is too short in the previous version. We planned for 3 rounds last week but repeated game seemed not ideal. Thus, instead we changed the game longer.
- Make everything cool.
- To make the station change more significant since some people think it is hard to notice the station change.
- People are heavily leaning towards ramming and once the advantage in health is built, it is hard to change the game situation. We added a cannon for more diverse weapon and to improve possibilities for game situation
- We create the ladder use the same color as the submarine itself for a coherent color palette
- The victory animation tends to be slow comparing to the fast pace of the game - so we speed it up for consisitency
- Technical soundness!
What's Next?
We are planning to have the following changes:
- Further improve the aesthetics of the game to make sure the game style looks consistent
- Add more environment objects and terrains
- Make the shield bouncing effect more juicy
- Tune parameters based on playtest feedbacks
Thank you for visiting our site and please look forward to our gold version on 4/21!
