Weekly Update 2: big changes are coming

We are still comitted to provide weekly Updates to our student project, but this also means that the game could radically change from week to week. But before I go into that, let's look at everything that's new:

• Player feedback: One big thing we wanted to improve for this week is player feedback. For that we mostly added some additional sound and visual effects here and there, to better show you when you got hit, when you absorbed something aswell as how to activate the color bars and a indication on what their effects are
• Tutorial: We added a really small and really temporary tutorial as the first level. That's just a placeholder and will be replaced during the end of the development
• Level transitions: When you enter and leave a level you now have to go through a sluice that only opens once you defeated all enemies in that level. It also prevents you from going back to previously completed levels, while also showing you a plceholder screen for how well you did during that level. All of this is supposed to make the run feel more like a series of smaller levels, than just one big level
• Enemy AI: We drastically improved the enemy ai (mostly because one programmer wanted to proof that he can) to follow different behavious like idleing, searching and following. Right now we only placed them in a few levels for testing purposes. Also because of the before mentioned changes. Speaking of:

Durign our internal we noticed several issues with the core aspects of our game. 1. the color swap mechanic wasn't used well with the current level design. For the most part we only stayed at one color and only switch it when necessary, while basically not absorbing any bullets. 2. Controls: switching through the colors is to clunky and not precise enough for a game where you are supposed to make quick decisions. Additionally we already use 5 buttons on top of the wasd movement.

Our solution: Going down to 2 colors. Let's see how it works out next week.