This is it, the big moment where we finally finish our game. This week was all about polishing, which means our focus was on improving things like player feedback, game balance and making everything prettier in general. Also, we made sure all (as far as we know) bugs are resolved. These bugs were a lot of work to fix, but at least some of them resulted in some pretty funny situations. I'll give you a short list of my favorite ones.

- If Captain and Gunner were in their seats when the game was lost, this would cause some strange issues when you restart the game. Captain would just stand around, unable to do anything, while Gunner prefered to move around in his sitting animation while firing his guns from anywhere. Captain had a similar problem with his revive animation, where he would just move around while being a floating corpse.

- Diver has these cool rotations now she (yes, it's actually a she now, more about this later!) can do in the water, however, when she would go back into the submarine, she would sometimes walk on her side or even upside down.

- We had some strange issues with room transitions not working properly, so sometimes characters were affected by rooms they were not currently in, causing them to drown. On the flipside, Engineer was able to repair random rooms all over the ship sometimes.

- The sharks outside had some issues with their death animation, resulting in them being stuck dying, while still able to move and attack, causing the ship to be swarmed by zombie sharks in no time!

- The big scary monster that is chasing the ship has some rubber banding implemented now, but this took some tweeking to get right. We had moments were it would slow down and literally stop together with the submarine and on the flipside, where it would rush in and cover the whole screen in a split second.

- Gunner's bullets had some unwanted collision, causing his shots to be blocked by tiny resources floating in the water, Diver's liveless corpse and even the ship itself.

A lot of these bugs had something to do with animations, which is one of the major things we implemented now. No longer would characters just stand in place when dead, they would actually do their dramatic death animation, as well as their excited jump back to life upon revival. Enemies and Diver got their full animation set as well, resulting in some epic underwater battles. All in all, it's a lot clearer now what is going on and when you are getting hit. We added some other animations around the ship as well, like moving parts on the pulley and engine, the gun and even the tiny rotor at the back of the ship.

Furthermore, we added particle effects to further enhance the feedback to the player about what they are interacting with. Shark and Diver attacks now have hit effects implemented, a blood splash for when they hit flesh and a spark flash for when they hit metal. Other particles in the scene are the explosion of the mine, which fills half the screen with a giant wave of bubbles, and the bullet trails that make shooting the gun just that much more fun.

Some other effects we added inside the ship to communicate to the players what's going on is outlines for every machine or item they can currently interact with. Together with darkening the background, this really makes everything pop more, finally making it clear what is going on at all time. In addition, we included red lights in every room that shine brighter once the room is damaged. Now the Engineer doesn't have to rely on just the water levels to guess what room they should go to.



A final thing we added to improve player feedback and also the general mood of our game, is sound. First of all, we have a couple of soundtracks playing the background, from the calm soothing tune of the menus to the upbeat urgent beat of the game itself. In the background, you can also hear atmospheric sounds like bubbling of the water and the humming of the sub. Whenever something goes on on the screen this is accompanied by a sound as well now, from crafting to using the sonar to being bitten by a shark. We tried to create this seperation between inside and outside the ship by making every sound outside muffled like it's really under water.

My favorite sounds that we added however, are the voice lines for the four characters. As we have a four member team, we thought this was an area in which we really could come together and inject some of our own joy and personality into the game as a team. We all picked the character that we had played the most during playtesting. Like I mentioned before, the Diver is officially a girl now, since our artist Charlotte turned her into a happy-go-lucky explorer with her voice, singing excitingly as she swims around the ocean floor. Our other artist Joran turned the Captain into this senile old man, who is just there to share his love with the new generation and doesn't remember what's going on half the time. With the voice of our programmer Robin, the Gunner became this strong Russian comrade, determined to protect his crew and not afraid of any challenge. Last but not least, our other programmer Jarne made the Engineer into an emotionally unstable workaholic, constantly rambling either his cocky and confident lines or spiralling down into a sudden panic. As soon as you select your character, something that works like a charm now as well, your character will say one of their iconic voice lines. From that point on, whenever something important happens in the game, whether it's running out of fuel or the big monster showing up, one of the relevant characters will make a remark about it both, both as an extra way to communicate to the player as well as making the game feel more alive. However, if you really don't want to hear any of it, we included a mute button in the settings as well.

With everything implemented, it all came down to testing the game and giving it a proper balance in game mechanics, as well as providing a level that was both challenging and exciting. We played around with some different areas for the submarine to traverse and switched around some numbers between the characters to change their power levels. Engineer, who was ironically the most useless character in our original draft of the game, turned out to be one of the most important characters for the team.  In the meantime, both the Gunner and Diver weren't really required to complete the level. Thus, we decided we should shift some of the responsibilities around to make the whole thing more balanced. We made the cost of crafting for the engineer a lot higher, from one resource to five, to increase the need for Diver to collect resources as an essential task. The other problem we had was that Diver was just as efficient, if not more, in killing sharks than the Gunner. To solve this, we increased Gunner's movement speed and the speed and damage of his guns. To balance it out again, we added a lot more sharks for him to shoot as well, giving Diver more time to collect for Engineer. We played around with different numbers of starting resources as well, but in the end we decided the only thing you really needed in the beginning was the ability to craft your first med kit. Corals and metal could be found already in the starting area, but just in case the Diver would drown already before encountering the first sharks, there is a way now to recover from this.

While playing the game, we also noticed we already developped different stategies for playing the game. One overpowered one that we enountered early on is simply standing  with the pump in the Captain's room and rushing through the level, ignoring all damage to your ship. To counter this we decreases the draining speed of the pump, as well as increasing the drainage on fuel, so the engineer had to run down a couple of times. Another funny thing we tried was using the Diver as a wrecking ball to detonate mines and then healing her again with med kits.

As a final touch, we added some cool post processing effects to the camera. The closer the big monster is now, the more vingette and purple colorization will cover the scene. In addition, we threw in some camera shake for whenever the submarine is hit, especially when you crash into a mine or wall.  We tried around with some other stuff, like film grain, a fish eye effect and chromatic abberation, but we decided this was too much. We did run a playtest on maximum fisheye to see if we could make it though just for fun.

With all of that included, we can proudly say that our game is finished! It was a lot of work, but after 500 hours shared among the four of us and a lot of stressful nights, we all still agree that it was totally worth it.