Feedback and changes

We received feedback from Supermassive Games’ Director of Design Steve Goss as well as our tutors.

This is a summary of the main points we gained from this feedback:

• We already have the elements we need in the game, just need to work on refining them.
• The green ‘mountains’ don’t look appealing and are better removed.
• The broken moon with the debris is a nice touch and adds depth to the scene.
• The shooting needs to be refined, it doesn’t feel as if the player is receiving any visual cue that they have missed the enemy because no bullet is fired.

Following up on this feedback we made the following changes to the game.

Removed the green mountains

They didn’t fit well in the scene and were causing lag, so it was for the best that we removed them.

 

Let the player shoot when they aren’t hovering over an enemy

By restricting the player’s bullets to only shoot when the player clicks on an enemy, we were lacking visual feedback for the player. The average ratio of mouse clicks to bullets fired was heavily imbalanced and this proved to be an issue.

 

Faded reticle

The reticle is now set to 20% opacity when not hovering over an enemy, and 100% opacity when over an enemy. This is a subtle cue for the player to shoot when hovering over the enemy, and keeps it from being overbearing otherwise.

 

Increase the amount of debris over time

Steve Goss recommended that we start with a large amount of debris on screen on the first stage, then make them gradually spawn in the center of the screen more commonly as it gets closer to stage 5.

 

Reworked particle effects

I reworked the particles to fit the theme of our game more. Previously, we were using an elemental effects pack to trigger an explosive effect on destroyed enemies, but it felt too dramatic. Since our theme is meant to be very digital I created a custom pixel-inspired explosion using the particle renderer and a plain square texture. It was subtle and fit our game more, and also didn’t lag at all in comparison to the previous effect, which would lag if too many enemies were destroyed at once.

A similar effect was put on a loop in our scene, with particles flying past the player. These particles also look like pixels but are much more translucent, so they look like air particles and gives the illusion of forward movement.

 

Added pickups

We felt we were lacking something and we already had experimented with a time slowdown function, so we decided to let this be accessed through a pickup that adds to a gauge. This let onto us experimenting with other ideas such as invincibility and health. I also implemented a magnet mechanic that attracts pickups to the player if they go within a certain radius of them, as I had noticed during playtesting that at times it was hard to actually collide with the pickups due to their small size. Details on individual pickups can be found here.