Testing

There were various things implemented or changed based on tester feedback, including differentiating the player from enemies, a pause menu, a help screen, modification to the enemy AI, and difficulty adjustments.

 Enemy ships and missiles now have a red rectangle surrounding them. This was done by using a world space canvas for each ship/missile and a 9-sliced image for the rectangle. Additionally the player's hull and armour bars have had their colours changed from grey and orange to blue and green to further differentiate the player from enemy ships. An alternative approach to the red rectangles would have been to change the colour of the enemy sprites; however, depending on the colour, enemies, especially enemy missiles, could have been made harder to see. The red rectangles are easily identifiable and also solve an issue where missiles were harder to see when the planet was behind them. These changes are shown below.

A help screen has been added that can be accessed from the pause menu or the main menu which explains each weapon and their controls (shown below).

A pause menu has been added which can be loaded while in game using the 'ESC' key. Pausing is done by setting the timescale to 0 and disabling firing of weapons. It contains a resume button, a settings button, a help button, and an exit button. Settings and the help screen were able to be added to the pause menu as they use the 'additive' load scene mode. This also fixes the bug in the main menu where the music would stop when switching to settings.

Enemy ship AI has been changed slightly. Previously, enemy ships flew off screen when the player got too close in order to stay at their preferred distance. However, when out of the camera space they are programmed to fly back in. This resulted in ships sometimes moving erratically which increased the difficulty of the game. Now enemy ships will flee in a direction that should keep them on screen (shown below).

There were also some minor changes: Each difficulty 'Normal' and below has been made easier, a hit sound as has been added to point defence guns so that it is easier to tell when you hit an enemy or when you get hit, a main volume setting has been added, the menu button size has been scaled by 1.2x, and the font used has been changed to 'Cascadia Code' to better fit the style of the game.