Easter weekend was spent rebuilding the game scene from scratch in order to adjust minor compositional errors in the setup. With half of the core mechanics in the game already, I wanted to make sure that before we added any more that what we had felt good for the player so that we have a strong base to build off of.
The first step was to change the placement of the ships and cannons and bring them lower in the scene. The use of overhead space was not being utilized, and frankly it felt pretty awkward to have the bomb bouncing around the bottom half of the screen rather than the top half; cannons are meant to be aimed upward, so the more time players spent shooting up into the air the better. It's a lot less likely that the ball gets stuck at the bottom of the screen without actually hitting either ship.
The next step was fixing a small bug with the left cannon model that caused it to squish when rotating; ended up only needing to rebuild the prefab.
In adjusting this, I also slightly increased in the size of the bomb and the cannonballs just so that it was a little bit easier to hit your target; since we're planning on limiting the number of cannonballs the player can spam, the player needs to be able to semi-reliably hit the bomb, which proved somewhat difficult to do. This will continue to be monitored.
Fourthly, I changed the control scheme from up-down style control to left-right, simply because it felt better on my hands in conjunction with having to press shift to fire.
Lastly, the most important change was the physics. The game felt really floaty coming into this weekend. It felt more like launching foam balls at a balloon than cannonballs at a big heavy bomb. The adjustment to physics made it so that the cannonballs and bomb have more weight to them so that they fall faster, and the cannonballs specifically have more momentum so that they move the bomb further. This is also going to be an ongoing process of adjustment.
Now that all of these core game-feel issues were fixed, we can look to implement the last mechanic this week and spend the rest of our time on polish.
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