Submission Update!

For the submission I have been improving many small problems I had in terms of gameplay, programming and feel. My brief is all about the design and programming side of it so that is why it is my focus. As previously stated I'm going to create pretty assets over the next week or 2 to give the Lily level a nice polishing.

A list of general changes and improvements done to old areas:

• Changed the tanks projectiles to the new square tipped type, personally I think it looks a lot better than the old one. 
• Changed the tanks special projectile from the missiles to big bullets again for same reason. Also improved their speed for better feeling. 
• Added collectible scrap to the tank level in areas that are used to give the player a rest. They are also in platforming sections and hard to reach areas.
• Enemies on the tank level now drop a lot more scrap, this was part bug fix and balance issue. Initially they could only drop a max of 7 scrap due to the actor being destroyed too quickly, this has been fixed. They also got a small bump in minimum amount to drop so that the numbers at the end of the level are roughly in line with Lily's scrap amount.
• Bosses now actually reward scrap.
• Scrap now gets banked at the end of each level for purchasing equipment in the base.
• Made the tank camera a lot more user friendly after the experience gained on Lily's mode. This easier to use camera makes things like check pointing a lot cleaner in terms of programming.
• Improved the clarity of the numbers on the tank UI that display the current number of special projectiles.
• Created a unified level selector that knows is a level has been unlocked.
• Added in difficulty modifiers for the player to increase game speed and change starting lives for increased or reduced rewards.
• Fixed the Camera Bug in player base that disabled camera movement if input keys were pressed.
• Unified the fonts on all UI for a more consistent look
• Made it so the fuzzy dice on the tank are physics based. In my opinion it adds a surprising amount of character and fun as they bounce around when spinning the tank in the base. It was annoying me that they were static as it stood out as weird considering the underwear and flags were waving around.
• Created an unlock and purchase system for buying tank upgrades (at the moment just weapons) it is pretty concrete at this point, works well and is easy to expand.
• Fixed Texture problems with the luck cat accessory and also animated it to make it more interesting.
• Fixed Normal map problems with all the turret types and cleaned them up to look more refined.
• Fixed Boss sounds so that they sync up with game speed up properly
• I felt like the machine gun and sub machine gun were great but were used up so quickly, this was very noticeable in the elevator section where the sub machine gun lasted less than a quarter of the way. I didn't want to up their damage because it's fun filling an enemy with a mass of bullets, so I multiplied their ammo counts by 2.5 and they last as long as I think is right now (About the same as the shotgun)
• Checkpoints in both styles of level now work as intended consistently. Death isn't a major setback now, nobody wants to go through a load of level work again and again to fight a boss they are struggling on.

The fully up to date hacknplan. As you can see its basically just pretty stuff and extra mode stuff left to do.

Finally, this level has taken a lot longer to do than the original one, but I think this is down to a lot of things being groundwork. In the tank level it's enemies don't require much (aside from the boss) but in Lily's level many things such as AI, properly skinned rigs, tonnes of animations and sound work had to be done.  

Now that all this ground work is in her levels should be a bit quicker to come together as most enemies will fall into the 3 categories that I already have, with a few extra things in their unique blueprints. 

This work wasn't just solely focused on a level either (unlike the tank one) a lot of the UI and save systems had to be created, so I'm glad that's out the way. After working with those 2 aspects a lot more they've started to make more sense in the way they work.

In the next brief I will continue to create this game, using each of its levels to experiment with different ideas to see what works well in either of these gameplay styles and to continue improving all of the skills I've used on this game.