Poseidon's hidden treasure Windows, Mac game

What’s New?

Oh boy. You feel like you’ve come so far and yet there’s never too little to iterate on. The final patches were so much fun to work on.

Ship Responsiveness

Players felt that the ship was drifting off a little too much. So we increased drag to make the ship feel more responsive. This leaves the players with a better feeling!

Fix map covering the engine

Players previously couldn’t use the map and fix the engine at the same time. We fixed this by moving the map a little so players can see the engine buttons.

Player movement

Players moved too fast inside the ship which made it hard to get to a the intended stations inside the ship. So we decided to slow the players down.

Remove the hunger bar

The hunger bar was a cause for a lot of confusion. It added a new system of health which players had to take care of, but it wasn’t presented well. We tried buffing and nerfing it’s impact (end game/slow players down but I guess we couldn’t find a good fit for it. So we decided to remove it and let fish increase the ship’s health instead.

Better Guidance!!!

Big changes here! Players were very confused, and didn’t know where to go. Sometimes they lost their way trying to get to the first note, and sometimes they didn’t know where to go after the crystal caverns. So firstly, we added an arrow that points to the first note. After that, since the players have the map, we increment the locations on the map according to the notes collected. So right after the anchor note, we added a place called “Possible Treasure” for players to look at.

Nerfing the main game

In general, the game was moderately hard to beat. We didn’t intend to make “Dark Souls: Underwater edition”. So we decided to nerf the levels. We decreased the number of sharks in the crystal caverns to make it easier, and with the fish now directly increasing the ship health, and with better guidance, the game is much easier.

Subtitles!!

Because you can’t expect players to have sound on and listen to the voice clips carefully all the time.

Shortened tutorial

Another big issue was that the tutorial was too long. So we trimmed it. It gives all the same experience and guidance in a much shorter time frame.

Better End Screen

We added a funny note to the end screen. Play to find out what it is!

Ship leaking animation

We added a ship leaking animation when the health went down. Just a bit more juice since we had time on our hands.

Music

We changed the background music for the Menu, Tutorial and Main game! We got some really good music from our composer Alex Wagner! We’re absolutely in love with the music!

Contact: alexwags@umich.edu

What’s the motivation?

The motivation this time was to make a final finished product. We fixed all the tiny issues we found to make for a great user experience. We focused on better guidance, music and the overall experience.

What’s next?

Who knows? For now, this is it. If the future has something in store for us, we intend to respond to that when it happens.