Development Log - Week11

This is it, the big moment where we finally finish our game. This week was all about polishing, which means our focus was on improving things like player feedback, game balance and making everything prettier in general. Also, we made sure all (as far as we know) bugs are resolved. These bugs were a lot of work to fix, but at least some of them resulted in some pretty funny situations. I'll give you a short list of my favorite ones.

- If Captain and Gunner were in their seats when the game was lost, this would cause some strange issues when you restart the game. Captain would just stand around, unable to do anything, while Gunner prefered to move around in his sitting animation while firing his guns from anywhere. Captain had a similar problem with his revive animation, where he would just move around while being a floating corpse.

- Diver has these cool rotations now she (yes, it's actually a she now, more about this later!) can do in the water, however, when she would go back into the submarine, she would sometimes walk on her side or even upside down.

- We had some strange issues with room transitions not working properly, so sometimes characters were affected by rooms they were not currently in, causing them to drown. On the flipside, Engineer was able to repair random rooms all over the ship sometimes.

- The sharks outside had some issues with their death animation, resulting in them being stuck dying, while still able to move and attack, causing the ship to be swarmed by zombie sharks in no time!

- The big scary monster that is chasing the ship has some rubber banding implemented now, but this took some tweeking to get right. We had moments were it would slow down and literally stop together with the submarine and on the flipside, where it would rush in and cover the whole screen in a split second.

- Gunner's bullets had some unwanted collision, causing his shots to be blocked by tiny resources floating in the water, Diver's liveless corpse and even the ship itself.

A lot of these bugs had something to do with animations, which is one of the major things we implemented now. No longer would characters just stand in place when dead, they would actually do their dramatic death animation, as well as their excited jump back to life upon revival. Enemies and Diver got their full animation set as well, resulting in some epic underwater battles. All in all, it's a lot clearer now what is going on and when you are getting hit. We added some other animations around the ship as well, like moving parts on the pulley and engine, the gun and even the tiny rotor at the back of the ship.