Updates

User Interface Updates and Tweaks

• User Interfaces are hard. I updated the user interface for the campaign page so that the player gets feedback from hovering and clicking buttons. This would ensure the player is getting the required feedback from the game, which displays and highlights the correct campaign and subsequent Mission they are currently on.
• Loadout Weapons now show an image associated with the weapon. This was made possible because of the Weapon Systems Update below. The challenge now is to come up with awesome art for the weapons UI.

Audio Updates

• There has been sound added to the level loading action that indicates when a new level is loaded. It also plays when the character dies and the level is reloaded.
• The gunshot sound has been removed from the gun scene and is added to the Game scene independently. This allows for when the character dies the sound doesn't just cut off midway through playing, causing an awkward cut in sound consistency.  After observing this for a while I have decided that creating many instances per second of a sound clip may not be great for performance, so I reverted to one sound asset, and the character dies after a short-timer to prevent the awkward cut in sound consistency.
• The sound related to footsteps have also been updated. These play at specific frames of the animation. when the animations were updated it threw off some of the sound cues. This is fixed here.
• Audio is needed for the New Items (Armor and Health). When using these items you get no feedback sound or animations. A sound has been introduced however not fully implemented.

Weapon Systems Update and Skins

• The previous weapon system used arrays to manage the weapon stats. I have since decided to use the dictionary / JSON format. This decision was made to facilitate more data within the weapon, such as skins, colors, and images.  This allows data to be directly targeted from the library and avoids having to memorize array indexes.  This action has caused game-breaking bugs as the entire weapon system needs to be overhauled to accomplish this goal. Most bugs caused by this change have been fixed, however, some may have been missed. Any further bugs associated with this will be fixed as discovered. 

Items Update New and Tweaked

• Health and Armor Packs are finally here. I always planned to have more items added to the game over time. I was shocked I didn't introduce these items sooner. I now remember why though. I am not totally sold on how Items are handled in the game. Because of the variety of items planned to be released, I am not sure this current way of handling items will work for all items. For instance, all items have the same animation, this will not work and must be tweaked to better fulfill the item's role. A throw item should not have the same animation as a dropped or injected item.

Animation Updates

• Some animations have been updated and others are under review. All death animations to be changed and the muzzle flash animation has been changed. Seeking to finalize the most commonly used animations for the base game. Sprites are always in constant review as they affect the look of the game which is very important. 
• Some animation bugs are present when changing weapons. Yet to tweak and fix this. I may look into changing how the animation state machine works.

Story Tools

• I have not developed a story for the game yet, however, I am have begun to develop tools to assist when I do have a story to tell. So far it's a simple dialog box, but due to the nature of the player camera movements, in order to show the dialog box consistently, I would have to disable the player movement. I'm yet to determine how to use this tool and it is still in development.

Multiplayer Updates

• Although I haven't done any major updates to the multiplayer I have begun cleaning up. Previously I was going to Use Nakama for Multiplayer however I'm deciding on another implementation. With this update, I removed the files that were needed for the implementation of the Nakama multiplayer system.