Galactose - End of Capstone

Hey everyone!

We've accomplished a lot in these two quarters, and our game is now at 1.0!

A fair number of things have changed since our last blog post nearly 3 weeks ago, so we have a lot of cool videos to show off today.

We held our fourth playtest recently and got some pretty useful results. I'd like to take a second to thank everyone who showed up to our various playtests this semester, as their feedback has been invaluable to improving our game.

We've done a lot of polishing in these last three weeks, and we have added final versions of all our art assets. We found and received permission to use some pretty awesome music. We added in a planet in the background (a donut with an ring), to give a sense of location. We also overhauled the UI significantly and tweaked our shaders and visuals a bit. We'll talk about all of this below.

Mission 1 - Start:

New & Updated Content

We received final art for the player's mothership, a donut model for the planet, some neat backgrounds art, and also a bunch of really cool music. We now have backgrounds for the victory, defeat, briefing, and title screens. In addition, we were able to find an awesome, freely usable font on Google's webfonts page, Nova Square ( http://www.google.com/webfonts/specimen/Nova+Square ), which greatly improved the readability and style of our typography. For the music we got songs for missions 1 & 3 from Matthew Pablo ( http://www.matthewpablo.com/ ), "Theme of Agrual" (Mission 1, also All-You-Can-Eat Mode), "Dark Descent" (Mission 3), and "Space Cake" from Sarah Wikman (Mission 2).

Mission 2 - Start:
Mission 2 - Game Over:


New Features

We made several major changes to our game in this period, the biggest three of which were rewriting sound and the user interface, and adding the ability to retry a failed mission.

For the user inteface, we got some pretty neat wireframes and images from Madeleine, which helped us greatly bring up the polish level on our game with these user interface tweaks.

We completely rewrote our audio engine this time, adding support for 3d positional sound, and better control over a couple of things. FMOD is pretty well documented, props to them.

The third major thing we added was the ability to retry a mission which took a couple of tries to really make robust but works very well now.

In addition to the major changes, we also tweaked a number of smaller things, such as tweaking the shield effect to have smaller particles when not near an impact, which really helped reduce make the shield look less distracting and further emphasized the impact areas. In addition, we revisited some of the shading parameters to the turkey and other things, making things look nicer overall.

Mission 3 - Start:
Mission 3 - End Game: