Devlog 13 : Recieved Tester Feedback and implemented it

What have I accomplished:

I have asked a tester (Dad) to test my game. He started playing the game and gave me a sheet of feedback. Upon deciphering the handwriting I made a list of main list of what needs to be improved.

Here is the list

• Give more screen-space for player to see ocean
• Do something about the radio messages being sent as they are very annoying when the player is exploring and they just appear and block the player’s screen
• Also the radio messages go away too quickly
• The flashlight isn’t crisp. It like bleeds into the ocean and doesn’t look nice
• The ocean environment is too dark, make it brigher

What/How did I implement the feedback?

As a result, I merged the top panel into the bottom panel while replacing the top section with the radio messages. This time the player has much more screen-space to play in while the radio messages just briefly appear on the screen, not blocking the player’s view.

As for the flashlight, I used a MeshInstance3D equipped with an emission Material so the flashlight looks much “crisper”.

I also increased the show time for the radio messages from 3 seconds to 5 seconds so player will realise that a message has popped and has sufficient time to read it.

As for the ocean environment, I just boosted the emission of the volumetric fog while make the background color slightly lighter rather than leaving it pitch black (Made it like a really dark navy blue).

Bonus bug patch!

While testing the game, I also found a bug with the Restart button in the pause screen.

The bug was that when the player pressed restart, the scene tree was still paused, so the intro animation wouldn’t start until you unpaused it.

So in order to fix this I just added another single line of code.

func _on_restart_button_pressed():
	get_tree().paused = false#This was the line of code needed
	get_tree().reload_current_scene()

That is it so far, definitely getting more people to test it (Family, friends etc…) and implementing more feedback!