Release

The game is finally in a state where it can be played! 

For this milestone, I focused on building levels and polishing existing things up. It isn't completely perfect, but that's alright since I plan on working on this further.

I am fairly happy with the levels that I built. Of them, the torpedo level is easily my favorite. I am very glad that the torpedo mechanic turned out the way that it did. My thought process behind them was similar to the destroyable platforms, but I wanted them to move and boost the player further when they were shot. In addition to the torpedoes  themselves, I am happy with how the torpedo spawners turned out. I was struggling with what to have as the spawner for a little while, and I ended up making it a pipe that opens up when the torpedo comes out, similar to how torpedoes are actually launched. I think that having the lid open makes them feel much more dynamic as an obstacle, and allows the player to time their jumps better. 

I also finally animated the grenade itself being put into and being taken out of the grenade launcher. In its current state, it works very well! I think it adds a lot to the grenade launcher feeling satisfying to use. Eventually, I would like to have the empty grenade shell eject as a physics object, but I'm currently not sure how I would go about doing that. Additionally, I would like to add sound to each step of the grenade launcher reload animation, which I am pretty sure I know how to do. I think that adding these sounds would add a lot to the experience of using the grenade launcher.

Speaking of sound, I finally added sound to the vast majority of things! My favorite of these are the dynamic footsteps depending on the surface you are walking on. I think the volume of them might need to be adjusted a bit, but they are noticeable enough for the time being. There is also a small bug where sometimes when you shoot several destroyable objects at the same time, the explosion sound will not play. I am relatively sure I know how to correct this. In addition to all of these sounds, I added a sound to the different puzzle activator objects to indicate when they have been activated. I kept the sound  consistent across all of them to make it easier for the player to understand when something has been activated, regardless of what it is. 

Of anything, the UI is what needs the most work. As it stands, the main menu and level select consist of basic UE5 buttons. I chose to direct my focus elsewhere instead of making the UI look really nice because I wanted to focus on making the gameplay enjoyable and polished, which I think I succeeded in. I do plan to tidy up the UI in the near future, though I  ideally would like to replace the level select screen with an explorable overworld (similar to the Splatoon single player campaigns/Mario 64/Psychonauts). 

I am overall very happy with how this build of the game turned out, even though I think it still needs some work. I think that it is satisfying to play, which was my ultimate goal in creating this game.