Hey everyone, this is the last devlog we'll be putting out for Adrenarun.

This week, we wrapped up feature development and will be "handing over" the project to our design team.

We met last week's goal of putting out a stable(enough) build for the Level Up showcase, and have worked with the numbers in the backend to make for a fairly simple playthrough. While we can't say for sure whether the numbers hold up and the game is in a healthy state, we're happy with what we've accomplished. The rest of the changes and polish will be up to our design team, while we will be keeping an eye out for any simple changes (like changes spawn rates, or damage numbers) we can make for a better player experience. However, we do have randomness at play within our game, so while we can weigh certain options to happen more, we can't fully control the player experience. Personally, I think that's a charming element.

Here's a summary of major elements that were updated/added in the last week:

1. We've biased the spawn rates in certain levels/waves to have a more natural difficulty progression. Prior to this, tanks and healer enemies were much more common than they should have been early on.
2. We've added our healer model. Animations and VFX for enemies are to be added by our design team in the coming weeks.
3. We've added predictive targeting to our flying ranged enemies. We found that they weren't up to par in strength compared to some of our other enemies.
4. We've disabled the portals in one of our levels (the one with the big tree in the middle). After playtesting, we found that bullets repeatedly passing through portals were too unpredictable to account for when the player was trying to dodge and maneuver around the level.
5. Tanks have two variants - one which has an indestructible shield that allows enemies to shoot through but blocks player projectiles, and an aggressor type that moves faster and charges at the player. They also rotate slower so the player has more opportunities to deal damage to the shield variant.
6. Audio updates - we've added SFX in most areas we felt it was necessary. In the following weeks we may further adjust audio in the game.
7. More visuals have been updated.
8. Bug fixes

I'd like to put out some personal thoughts as team lead of the project over the semester--

I learned that staying organized with a team of 10 people is really hard. Especially if you haven't done it before. While scheduling was strange because everyone had different commitments from their other courses, even without it I believe that I could have done a lot better to keep us organized.

I learned that writing code for games is a whole different beast from writing standard software. While I expected this going in, and the code structure we went with was in theory quite good, it presented a lot of unexpected challenges that we weren't expecting to have to deal with. A lot of this came down to experience though; a majority of our team was learning Unity as the semester progressed.

I learned that designing something good takes time and a lot of consideration. During the semester, suggestions would come up from teammates and guests alike and I would really want to explore the idea, but time constraints and scope creep were always at the back of my mind, leading to really good ideas going unexplored.

I'd also like to give a shoutout to the team, even if development isn't officially over yet.

Ethan, Max, Tony, Justin, Ike, Joe, Rick, Bennett, Rowyn, you're all amazing at what you do. 

I'm really glad I got to lead this project this semester.

Thank you, everyone!

-Andy