So I decided to give this project another month to polish and add some much needed features. In the previous devlog, I stated that there were many features that had to be cut, and I'm happy to say I had the time to at least try to implement most of them. Screen shake, more enemy variety, and different gun types have been added which, i think, add tons of replay value to the game. I also had to time to add thing like invincibility frames, tons of juice via sounds and particles, I added tons of variations to the movement patterns in the enemies using a variety of RNG variables to have them act slightly differently from one another.

That said, I think the feature I had to most fun implementing is the trophy room. I recently played the new Metroid Prime Remastered; to my surprise, there was a trophy room that let you unlock and examine some models from the game.

If you grew up playing games, you might remember another game that did some thing similar: Super Smash Bros Melee

The feeling of joy you get when you unlocked one of these things was a big inspiration for adding these. But it also allowed me to add something that I was told was missing from the original version of the game: Lore.

These trophies in smash would always come with a little excerpt describing the game or lore the figure came from. It was perfect opportunity to add some world building and context in the game to give players an idea and motivation for shooting down a bunch of enemy fighter pilots.

So I took many of the models already used in the game and put a base underneath them and did my best to add some cheesy descriptions of a conflict between an corrupt fascist empire and rebel fighters very much in line with a lot of sci-fi fantasy, but really leaned into the political ideology behind it by adding overt parallels between those sci-fi stories and modern day US imperial and domestic policy. 

The nice thing about all this is that I was able to add an unlock system to incentivize players to keep playing and getting a higher scores to unlock more trophies while also adding optional lore for players that are interested in to learn about. For relatively cheap input, I could double the use of certain assets and expand the depth of the game.

It also allowed me to express my own political ideology through art which is always rewarding :)