Week 17

We've come a long way, haven't we?

This week has been one of those unpleasant 'maintenance weeks' for Shane, who has been cleaning up animation and memory issues within the game -- namely, reducing animation sizes, shifting sprites to align with their shadows, etc. It's a tedious job but it needed to be done.

Meanwhile, I've been working on creating props for the environment and creating the How To Play menu. I also redid the armory for easier initial understanding. I also made the pause menu.

I received feedback from a level designer at Made In Mass who said that the armory had misled her -- she believed she could only pick one weapon or armor. I attempted to alleviate this confusion by adding a small blurb in the armory and changing some background art so show how the weapons and armors are grouped separately. Furthermore, I redid each item description to explain the passives and abilities of each weapon and armor. Hopefully, this will help players hop right into gameplay rather than having to figure out what each weapon and armor does.

I've considered eliminating the armory and replacing it with weapon and armor racks in the spawn room where players could attain new equipment. However, it appears the risk/reward ratio for testing this would be too high at this point in development, and I will probably focus on making the armory as simple as possible for new players.

Here is what the new environment props look like (I haven't converted them for the red base yet):

Meanwhile, JT implemented the pause menu, did other miscellaneous menu implementation work, added our music to the game, and implemented several other sound effects.

Next week, we're planning to add a new weapon and to implement all of the level art I've created into the actual game. I'll be finishing up the environment art and how to play menu, as well as starting to create dialog for the bots.