Planet Rebirth - Big Update :)

Originally 'Planet Rebirth' was developed within 2 weeks for the Game Dev Network game jam. We decided to keep working on the game to add some final features and polish it. This update should show the development process since the game jams' completion. 

What has been added?

• Added a combat system! (Currently only for the bug creature. Support for the others will be added soon)
• Improved the bug creature's AI, also now providing the player with extra carbon and food if they defeat a bug. 
• Improved gathering resources, now displaying text describing what resources were obtained.
• There are now prisoners walking around! They don't do much yet but you can see them roam the land and push them about.
• Added passive creatures - tiny, adorable creatures walk about adding a lot of life to the game. 
• Added more music tracks, that play randomly with gaps of silence in between, to try and add more life to the game.
• Added a death screen, the player will lose 2% of their energy when they die.  
• Started to add relics of a previous life for the player to explore (this will be expanded on in the next update).

Bug fixes / Improvements:

• Lots of improvements to the code, improving performance.
  
• Optimisation, specifically for the web version. 
  
• Improvements to the user interface. The text should no longer become buggy when the values are too large.
  
• Ship bug - you now must actually have all the resources required to fix the ship.
• Improvements to almost all objects' hitboxes.
• The Carbon Generator has been tweaked to be more balanced in the late game. 
• Total resources required to repair the ship and complete the game has been reduced drastically.
• Fixed audio cutting out. 
• Fixed invisible enemies and cacti no longer damage the player, due to this not being very intuitive. 

What next?

There is a lot that could be tweaked, improved or added. But we want to be realistic with this project, improve what we have already added to a level of polish that we can be proud of and then move on to hopefully develop new and more impressive projects. Here is a summarised list of what we plan to do before the next (hopefully final!) update:

• Improve AI for the other creatures to be equal if not better than the bugs AI.
• Add controller support.
• Improve the passive creatures hitboxes.
• Add more relics of a previous life, with an option to interact and display some text. Hopefully, this will give an incentive to explore.
• Dynamic music - music should become more intense when in combat.

Thank you for reading and I really appreciate any support towards our game :)

Jack Eatock