Beta Dev Blog


In this week, our primary focus was polish - changing and adding significant amount of juice, UI, and accessibility features to make the game more complete.

These new changes include:

  • Completion of store feature
    • Player can now buy ships in the store
    • The player can switch between these ships
    • The store is now an actual ship that follows the player in the level select screen
  • Adding the final playable ship - the Ironclad - into the game
    • The Ironclad comes with a fast and powerful torpedo
    • It also comes with state-of-the-art armor, for a much stronger ship
  • Added additional tutorial pop-ups for the level select and other ships
  • Addition of a boss battle and related encounter
  • Reworking of the UI to be cleaner
  • Balancing fixes:
    • Enemy ships in general are more numerous but weaker. This should help avoid situations in which the player is trapped in a slow one-on-one slugging match with another ship
    • Removal of a gold penalty on level loss
  • Juice additions
    • Ships now have appropriate water effects included with them
    • Scene transitions have been added into the game
    • New firing sounds for the torpedo and explosion

Bug Fixes:

  • The player should now be able to allocate more than just 4 crewmembers to a single station
  • The AI has been significantly reworked such that they stop constantly running into each other or the island
  • Fixed the counter for the defensive encounter so that it doesn't end prematurely

The significant motivation behind many of our actions this week was to finally add much needed juice and balancing adjustments that our game required. Some of these fixes include much requested juice for water and particle effects for the ships, so that the game looks and feels much more vibrant and active when being played. We've also added some scene transitions between scenes in the game to add a bit more polish. We've also worked on finally combatting many of the feedback regarding our sluggish gameplay - our hopes is that with the new AI system and health balancing fixes, combat should be significantly more dynamic and fun. Hopefully there should no longer be slow one-on-one fights that take minutes to beat. Other than that, we've finalized the storefront and finished work on our final encounter of the game: the boss battle.

For our next sprint, our team will solely be working on fixing bugs and continuing to polish our game. Additional reworking to textures and graphics, such as the islands, water, and UI, are also upcoming.

Get Troubled Waters

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