Presentation and Graphics

At this point the sprites for point defence guns, railguns, missiles, the base ship type, asteroids and the background have been added. Some of these are shown below:

The start and end of level backgrounds were made using tilemaps. Ship sprites are made of a few pieces. This includes the main body,  and any weapons attached to the ship. A closer look at a ship is shown below:

Asteroids have 3 sprites, two large and one small (shown below). Asteroids in game are randomised to one of these sprites and may be scaled slightly larger or smaller. It was done this way rather than just having the same sprite/size so that the asteroids were more varied in looks and less predictable when dodging while still keeping their approximate locations.

Asteroids also have a shatter effect on impact (shown below).

The background has a slight parallax effect, revealing a moon behind the planet at approximately the half way point of the first level. This is the planet near the end of the level for reference: 

This was done by using the same script as the camera movement to move the background images from one point to another, it follows the same animation curve as the camera. 

Feedback:

Positive feedback mentioned the particle effects and how thrusters change with the ships movement. Other feedback mentioned putting health bars on enemies, this has been added and will be shown in the next testing session/dev diary (UI and Polish). Another piece of feedback suggested that the weapon sprites turn red as they heat up. This has not been added but a weapon info box is now displayed for each weapon at the bottom of the screen and that will turn red when overheated. This will also be shown in the next testing session/dev diary. To further signify overheating, weapon sounds have been added which will increase in pitch the closer the gun is to overheating. Other feedback mentioned the difficulty of the game including things such as hitting enemies with railgun shots. This has not been adjusted as railgun hits are supposed to be difficult but do lots of damage when successful. However, point defence damage has been increased and player missiles have been added, which should make the game a bit easier. Furthermore there are now different difficulty settings which adjust player and enemy health.