What's New:
- This week we have been polishing our game to increase the level of professionalism expressed by the gameplay. We have added a new ready up screen with entertaining character animations, character emotes which can be activated in the submarine (using the dpad down), a thematic bubble scene transition, and an ending cut scene to concluded the player's journey to rescue their friend. For bug fixes, we have reduced the jitter that players experience when leaving the submarine. And we have added a white "poof" using the particle system when an enemy is killed and a yellow spark when a shell hits a pipe on the submarine for some extra juice. The bombs now have more realistic physics with momentum and drag in the water. We have added a new rock crab enemy that requires bombs to destroy. Finally, we have added more length to the game by adding in more enemies and more boss health.
Motivation:
- This week we were motivated to make our game more polished so we focused on adding extra juice, scene transitions, an entertaining ready up screen, and character emotes to make the game more emotionally engaging. To increase player guidance we have added an additional 'A' button tutorial so players know they can drop the bomb, additional audio to show that bubbles cannot destroy rocks or rock enemies, and a crab boss death and final cut scene so they know that the game is over and they have won. We wanted to encourage the use of bombs in combat with the small crab enemies and felt that the trident was overpowered so we added rock crabs which can only be destroyed by the bombs. We felt that the game was a bit short and we wanted to provide more gameplay for the players after the tutorial levels so we increase the length of the later levels to test the players' skills.
What's next:
- This build is acting as an experiment for the longer levels and new waves of enemies. We plan to gain feedback from playtesting to gauge the difficulty of these levels for new players and adjust the enemy health and count to make the game of medium difficulty (so that most new players could win the game on their second attempt). We have also been considering jellyfish enemies that can block players and their bubble projectiles. Lastly, we would like to update the ending state of the game when players run out of oxygen. Currently, players lose that game when the submarine runs out of oxygen. This does not make much sense for players that are outside the submarine and about to bring in a new oxygen tank. We were thinking that the new ending state of the game would be when all players are in the empty submarine or in the revival bubble.
