This week's changes/improvements:
- Increased time of invincibility on respawn (invincibility used to be removed when the respawned player moved)
- Implemented a warning system so players know when asteroids are about to fly on screen
- Juiced up the movement of the new score ship to make players want to score there
- Added some simple fade-in/fade-out scene transitions to give the game a more professional feel
- Modified background so there are no longer stars that look like straight lines of pixels
- Modified score ship movement so it no longer moves in the last ten seconds of gameplay
- Updated the title screen to include a credits page as well as an exit option
- Modified music so it persists between the title and readyUp screens (no longer restarts on transition)
- Updated the respawn signifier to be a bit more high quality
- Increased the font resolution of the game timer
- Fixed a bug where not all players could view controls during main gameplay
- Fixed a bug where the start button did not appear next to the skip text in intro cutscene
- Fixed a bug where the powerup spawners did not follow the camera
- Updated coin and ship movement so players, coins, and the score ship can no longer go off screen
- Updated final ten second countdown timer to move more smoothly with the main camera
- Updated the asteroids to 3D models
- Reduced asteroid frequency and removed asteroid rubberbanding
- Removed the long time delay after the end of the game
- Implemented a more detailed scoreboard at the end of game with new stats like most kills
- Lightened up all of the energy wheels so they are more visible
We are one week away from our final release of Escape to Hyperspace, but we're still working on making the game feel enjoyable to play. Our rubberbanding implementations last week resulted in incredibly deadly asteroids that were very hard to avoid and resulted in a lot of player deaths. Our playtesters last week were less than enthused with the overall game experience because of this. We had to remove asteroid rubberbanding as a result of our playtesting feedback. In addition to the asteroid rubberbanding removal, we updated the look of the asteroids and provided players with a warning before asteroids fly on screen. There were a number of bugs in last release as well that were fixed in this iteration, including UI elements that were not appearing properly on screen and bugs left over from our transition to a camera that follows the players around on the screen.
Our last week of playtesting will result in additional tasks being added to the queue for next week, but there were a number of tasks we didn't get to this week that will be addressed in the final deliverable. We still have not received final textures or a coin model from our artist, which will be useful in the final deliverable to make our game feel put together and polished. We also should be receiving new music that we hope to incorporate into the final build of our game. We'd like to make sure all objects in the game have visual effects and sounds. We will also be recording our final version of our game trailer this week in preparation for the Game Showcase on December 11th, 2018.
