Third update, improved visual feedback

Hello folks, it's been a few weeks but part four of my DevLog for Hospital Defender is ready.

The final stage for my game development course was having this game tested and survey the testers. I got very valuable feedback from my testers to improve the game. Most criticism was that the game was confusing and frustrating because people didn't got enough visual feedback of what was going on. For many people the game was also to difficult. I addressed most of these problems in this update. 

Before I received this feedback I already had some visual upgrades done so I start with sharing those. First did a bit of post processing to give the game a slightly better look with more contrasts and bloom effects. See below for a before and after comparison:

Another visual upgrade I did was making the bacteria look a bit nastier by adding a particle effect. With some tweaking it now looks like a cloud of smelly flies is surrounding the creatures. 

First thing I did to improve the user experience was adding an in-game menu so that players can quickly restart the level or go back to the main menu. I made it so that this menu is shown by pressing [ESC] or a button on the screen in the top left corner. Creating the menu and implementing the buttons was not difficult but there was a challenge to pause the rest of the game while the in-game menu is showing. I solved this by having the Timer component throw an event that the time is stopped and all the components that have moving parts respond to this event. The "resume" button on the in-game menu then let's the timer known that it can run again, which throws another event.

NOTE: on itch.io the enemies do not pause when using the game menu, anyone knows why? (stopping co-routines) 

Next was implementing something to made the game less frustratingly difficult. I decided to do something with the targets of the enemies that the player has to defend. From now on, when an enemy reaches a target, that target disappears for a moment and then returns. Other enemies that are on the way to that target get a different target assigned. This makes the game easier if the player has not build defenses on one part of the map and give the player more time when enemies take longer to move on the map. For the theme of the game it can be explained that the patient is unfortunately passed away (or moved to the ER) and new patient are brought in after some time. 

To implement this I had to make some big changes in the code, especially on handling how targets are assigned to enemies. Having the targets fade out and in was also challenging but fortunately I could re-use parts I created earlier. The result makes the game a bit more fun to play I think:

Another thing most of my testers find confusing is the money management. It was unclear when money was earned or going away. I know that many strategy games where the player can build tings for resources, they show the loss of resources on screen. So I decided to do the same thing for my game. When the player builds something I want the cost of that building to flash for a moment on the screen and when a patient gets infected by an enemy, I also want to show the loss of money on screen.  Unfortunately, I couldn't figure out how to do it with UI Text elements in Unity so I decided to create images for the text so that I could simply use a sprite to animate. This worked but when I change something about the costs, I have to create new images. But for now it's fine and it works very well. 

Finally I also want to show the player the money reward when they destroy an enemy. This was a challenge because I have to show something on an game component (the enemy) that is no longer there (destroyed). After pulling out my hair for a few hours the solution was quite simple: create a separate component that handles showing the awards. Lesson learned that rather then try to have everything in one place, sometimes it easier to have several components loosely coupled.  

I think that these updates made the game more fun to play. 

Next up is different music, a tutorial and random rewards. 

Thanks for reading!