• Pauses in-game to introduce mechanics - press 'E' to continue/start game
• Make bottom black rect for UI elements vs sides - improve appearance on thin devices/phones
• UI elements:
  • Player health
  • Name of month
    • Improve X positioning of above elements
  • Main menu
    • Difficulty select
      • Difficulty = scoring modifier?
      • Easy (just CoV/booster) > unlocks normal (flu pathogens / cell swap) > hard (CoV variants - larger, harder to destroy)
    • Options page
      • Volume?
      • Controls?
      • Resolution?
        • Make a version accessible in-game
    • Information page with citations
      • External link &/or QR due to size limitations
    • List high scores?
  • Victory screen
    • Difficulty select/home
      • Perhaps add a star or other UI icon/message that the next difficulty was unlocked
    • Score-(local?) placing or top 5
  • Game over screen
    • Retry
    • Quit
    • Main Menu
• Scaling difficulty (spawn rate)
  • Curve or set month changes to iterate, e.g., func _on_spawn_timer_timeout … spawn_rate -= ___
  • Default spawn rate is 2.0s, going down 0.1 per month or 0.8 ultimately - easily adjusted
    • Normal starts at 1.8s, can also adjust booster shot fire rate gains
• Sound FX
  • Shooting antibodies
    • Noise added but removed for now as its obnoxious
  • Collision with pathogens
  • Pathogen destroyed
    • Perhaps less violent noises
  • Menu clicks
    • Light click on mousing over a button if possible
  • Victory
  • Game Over
    • Price is Right horn tune is funny but possibly copyrighted
  • Player damage
    • Different sounds/volume for damage level, e.g., short, -25 db sneeze at 4hp | long, -10 db at 1
  • Background Music
    • Additional tracks, perhaps with timers, to break up monotony
• Mechanics
  • Easy - Booster shot application
    • Having issues tracking progress - perhaps visualize with a loading bar later
  • Medium - Influenza pathogens
    • Distinctive noise for cell swapping?
  • Hard - SARS-CoV-2 variants
    • Louder/different noise with variants
• Particle FX
  • Pathogen destruction
    • Consider further changes to visibility and lifespan
• Player scoring
  • Point reduction for negative events, e.g., taking damage
• Icons to represent player health
• Animation for pathogen destruction
  • Can improve (background color change - brief explosion flash)
  • New issue: Can still hit destructing pathogens and get score.
    • In projectile.gd script, change antibody collision to "if area.hitpoints > 0"
• Flash (/color/size) animation when player takes damage
  • Perhaps further adjust opacity/visibility
  • Screen-wide flash? Brief (0.25-.5s) low-alpha (so as to not render playfield invisible during) white or red
• Unlockables?
• Automatic firing vs button to fire - former may be preferable on mobile devices and for accessibility
• Slow down pathogen speed?
• Translations
• Learn about “rcedit” tool to add icons to Windows builds
• Jump through hoops to sign and notarize MacOS build
• Add rotation / animate pathogens
• Parallax / scrolling background vs static
  • Implemented in main menu, may be distracting/cause sensory overload in levels
• Different backgrounds/BGM for difficulty stages?
  • Main menu BGM
  • Normal level BGM
• Win state stops damage/score accruing
  • Infinite play? Does the month timer keep ticking? Spawn rate stay the same, reset, continue to challenge?
  • Perhaps victory screen should have a 'continue to try and get a higher score' button
    • Troubleshoot button not working immediately
• Tweak 'not unlocked' button to not highlight
• Update menu background layers so pathogens move in other directions
  • Add other models: influenza pathogens, blood cells, other immune cells, etc.
• Improved button icons and panels

Bugs:

• Launching the level from a separate menu scene causes the victory screen to not work
  • Level functions properly if level added as exported PackedScene vs file
  • Main menu button doesn't function from within level now either in victory or gameover screens
    • Buttons work if opposite, now loading file vs PackedScene
• Health icons don't always update correctly
  • Consider moving to _process vs set function
• BGM doesn't always start immediately
• Booster button can be used anytime on normal, resetting the timer but not updating fire_rate
  • Moved timer start function, now stops month/spawn timer for unknown reason
  • Delays timer start - again, reasons
• Normal hi-score on main menu doesn't update

To-do:

• Add influenza antibody object/script
  • Flu antibody = bright green?
  • Change sars_antibody to only receive damage from sars_antibody group - same with flu
• Resize flu pathogen model, collision, and explosion particles - shrink
• Add destruction animation for influenza pathogen
• Import/re-color B-cell model for flu
• Add cell swap function to player
  • Add button to top center of UI box and label identifying current cell type
    • Text color = cell type to add visual marker
• Add new BGM to menu and normal level
• Change background for normal level
• Modulate booster_avail text, perhaps white-red
• Add influenza pathogens to 1-2 parallax layers for menu
• Add hard level, menu updates, etc.
• Look into feasibility of adding a WebGL build to itch.io
• Download other cough sounds - unique cough per health loss
• Accessibility
  • Does damage flash trigger photosensitive players?

Meeting Thoughts

• Instead of game over when sick, debilitated ala long covid
• Start in January v. March
• Maybe RSV for hard diff rather than variants
• Celebratory effects when month passes
• Paquette - are they a good source for this before/after??