Hello everybody,

We are finally at the end of our project!

We still needed to make some changes before we got here but we did it! We want to thank you all for all your support and have fun playing our final game.

Before we got here we still needed to change some stuff like:

The lighting:

The light needed a big change, it needed to give an atmosphere and don't feel flat. And also still look like your underground in an arena:

Post processing:

We also set some details in the post processing to give more warmth to the environment. This  with the new lighting made the colors of the arena more alive. 

Before post processing:

After post processing:

Environment:

We got some feedback about the environment and rework it a bit. The biggest change is the plants. And as you can see they are now almost everywhere. The idea was to make a plant that grows in the desert but only in the shadow. That's why you only see them on the side of the cave. 

Particles:

We did some changes to some particles to make them more complex and blend more in the environment. Some were also a bit off and we fix them if needed. 

The falling rocks now fall to the ground and when they collide there is a smoke effect that appears. also, there is smoke on the ceilings before they fall to give the feeling that the cave is unstable because of the fight. 

The ship trail had some issues because of the speed of the ship. The trails broke into multiple segments. this is no more an issue and also the trails become larger when you speed up.

- Performance Issue of the fireflies particle.

We made fireflies particles that lead the game to have performance issues. The particle is now optimized and causes no problems running the game.

We also change the particle when the player collides with the rocks. 

We also made sure that the systems who spawn those particles are properly removed from the level when not needed.

The rest are minor changes Like particles rotate randomly to make more variation between the explosion or change some particles because they went out of our art style. We changed the position of some particles in the level to make sure they come out nice.

Performance:

We wanted the game to run as smoothly as possible. We used some common technics Like LOD's to ensure that it runs on all machines.

We also changed some of the collisions of the meshes. As a lot of them were still using complex collision we added a collision hull using the auto convex collision tool. We still wanted to give the player the freedom to fly close to the walls and fit between the pillars that are close to the walls.  Therefor we went for the collision hull instead of putting collision boxes around the walls. 

Waves:

We changed the spawn rates of the waves, making it so only a small amount of enemies spawn in the first waves. This way, you can learn the game and the controls a bit before you are in actual danger. We also added an enemy cap, so you won't have to fight infinitely big amounts of enemies every wave.

Pickups:

Turret enemies now have a small chance of dropping a pickup when disabled. Bear in mind that the pickups will not despawn on the next wave and may be harder to get when the turret is re-activated.

We also increased the size of a few pick-ups to ensure they weren't to difficult to get.

Bugfixes:

We fixed a few bugs, one of them, where the game would crash randomly, was caused by a dangling pointer, which was easily fixed by setting it to nullptr in the right place. Another one was where the flying enemies would fly through the walls, We fixed this by turning simulate physics on in the enemy. However we don't use the physics for movement, so we had to set the velocities to 0 every frame, so it wouldn't interfere with our other movement.

Main Menu:

We added a video of the environment as a background in the main menu with some music aswell. This made the main menu a little bit more interesting while you check the leaderboard.