This week, we focussed on fixing most of our graphical and gameplay bugs and making sure everything we want it the game functions as it should. One of the important things we fixed right at the start of the game, is the character select. It is now actually possible to choose what character you want to play as and spawn in accordingly, instead of spawning in as a random character as soon as you press a button in game. We almost broke this system at the eleventh hour by changing a minor thing in the Captain's HUD, somehow leading to a domino effect of problems that made our whole game unplayable. Fortunately, our programmers quickly figured out what the problem was and everything seems to be working smoothly now.

Speaking of HUDs, the whole in game HUD got a bit of an overhaul. Each character and their health and oxygen bars have a nice slot assigned for them now. In addition, some of the characters have addition displays that can pop up on top of their character portrait. For the Captain, this is the sonar that he uses to spot enemies in the distance. For the Engineer this is the Crafting menu when in front of the workbench, as well as the Resource Inventory for Diver that shows up at the same time.

We noticed that our game is somewhat confusing when you are thrown into the deep without any prior knowledge, so we decided to add a simple tutorial as well, in the form of several slides for each character that explain their abilities and job in the ship. In addition, there is a section for the whole crew, that shows the general goal of the game and stuff that is everyone's responsibility.

Besides these we fixed some major bugs, mostly involving oxygen and health not working properly and character death messing up parts of the game. For example, when Captain died in his seat, the ship wouldn't stop anymore and kept going forward, or when Diver died, he would stay behind and have his rope stretch to impossible lengths. Another big one, was characters being affected too much by the momentum of the submarine, barely allowing them to walk or climb. These issues should be solved now for the most part.

In addition, we started polishing some of our features. Diver can do some cool loops now, as well as light up the scenery. So does the big monster, but his light is purple. The rest of the polish will be taken care of next week, as well as sound effects. Our artists already started working on ambient sounds and music. Maybe we will even include some personalized voice acting...