Polish and Submitting

The last few weeks have been all about polishing the game and making sure everything works and looks nice. Also, we submitted our game to the XBox live community for play testing. We got some good feedback about the game and a bug that we hadn't caught that has to do with saving and loading the scores. Daniel was going to look into making it a synchronous call so that the game waits for the data do save/load and hopefully that will fix it.

I worked on the sound system - the framework for making our sounds 3D was in place but wasn't being used. I also fixed the problem with too many sounds being played at once so there was a lot of distortion. I edited the song Burning ambition so that it looped and made the music loop when it finishes. I also trimmed the gravity sound effect and made it loop in the player instead. That way it can play as long as the effect is active.

I made a new sprite sheet for the cap ship weak point. Brandon showed me how to do lightning in Maya so I made a lightning ball and colored it purple. I also shrunk the normal maps and color maps for the ships to reduce our project size. I changed the health meters to correspond to the ship that's currently targeted and I added some lines to the radars to make them look more like radars instead of just circles. I also added a new menu screen background and separated the title into its own image so we can make sure it's title safe.

I finished up the turret class for Jason and Wilson. They were really close but they had never worked with models before so it was a little tough for them to finish. I also added code to the AI class so that the ships bug out after a certain amount of time if you haven't killed them. They only do it if you're not in phase 3 since you need to kill the ships in phase 3 to collect the tactical pod. I also got random ships to spawn in phases 1 and 2 so it's not just scouts. Only ships you've already seen up to that point will spawn though.

I worked on a few of the suggestions from the industry professionals that came to our class. One of them was to change the targeting system so that you're always targeting an enemy, and clicking L3 just targets the enemy in front of you instead of toggling it on and off. I tweaked the controls so that you can always barrel roll with the bumpers and change targets with D-Pad up and down.