DevLog 4 - Big changes

After an unintentional break in developement, progress has resumed on Warspite and much has changed since the last post.

Rather than shooting from far away, enemies now need to be within a certain distance to start shooting at the player. This change makes the game playable, rather than an unescapable bullet hell. In addition to this, enemies will now spawn around the player every few seconds. 

The boxes around the player are the areas in which enemies can spawn

The above video shows the enemy only starts shooting once they are close enough to the player

Sometimes, when an enemy is killed, one of two powerups can be dropped

The red pickup will provide a bonus to the damage the player deals, the green pickup will increase the player's health .

Also this week player movement has been reworked to reflect on feedback received during the week 12 feedback session. To counteract some issues that occured when the player collided with other objects, turning is now done by adding torque rather than just rotating the player object.

A Boss-type enemy has been added. This enemy will spawn significantly less frequently than regular enemies, will have much more health, and will be much more of a danger due to the increase in firepower it has

The most noticable addition this week was adding sound effects to many actions, such as the player shooting, enemy destruction, player destruction, etc. (Not sure how to uploade video with sound to a devblog)

Week 12 Feedback Summary:

During the feedback session in week 12, there were a few common themes with most of the feedback I received.

Firstly, that the way the player moved and how it interacted needed some tweaking, and that there were some bugs when interacting with other objects. As mentioned above to make movement feel better I changed how rotating the player works, so torque is added to counteract any rotational force gained from hitting other objects. 

Another common piece of feedback was that the game was almost impossible to last for any long period of time because the enemies would constantly shoot at the player regardless of how far away they were, I have resolved this by adding a check for distance in the script used for shooting at the player. 

I also received feedback saying that the various sound effects were too loud,  so all sound effects have had their volume significantly reduced to make playing the game less tolling on the player's hearing.

Other feedback received was generally about some features that could be add more variety to the game, like more enemies, different islands, generally just more variety in what happens.