Devlog 11

UI, main music, bug fixes and everything else.

As the project neared completion, the final development phase was reserved for stability, game polish, and visual consistency alone. With all core systems in place, my efforts shifted to bug detection and fixing, syncing multiplayer elements between clients and hosts, and fine-tuning responsiveness in the car and turret systems.

Gameplay & Networking Fixes

1. Fixed driver input bug: Driver clients can now safely control their own assigned vehicles network-wide.
2. Turret responsiveness fixed: Turrets now respond completely to input without desync or lag.
3.  Camera sync & visibility: Fixed a number of bugs where cameras did not track players or did not render vehicles properly. This included turret camera rotation smoothing and turning off unnecessary cameras on spawn.
4.  Multiplayer synchronization: A number of client-authority inconsistencies were corrected to ensure that all networked elements behaved uniformly in host and client implementations.

Spawning & Physics Corrections

1. Dynamic. Player spawning mechanism was solved to ensure cars get spawned in play areas all the time. 
2.  Fixed arena spawn bugs: Prevented infamous "4-car spawn" issue by cleaning up scene chases and accurate despawn before teleport.
3.  Cars fall through floor: Arena and lobby collider issues were addressed. Cars now make proper ground contact. 
4.  Obstacle movement glitches: In the past, players were unable to drive across certain obstacles. 
5. Colliders were rearranged and tuned to enable smoother crossing. 
6.  Sandstorm tuning: Storm values were significantly tweaked to make it much harder for vehicles to maneuver during storms, increasing the game disruption intended. 
7. Duplicate storm prefabs were added to enhance environmental immersion.

Visual & Environment Polish

1. Skybox added for atmospheric depth.
   
2. Turret textures and lighting improved to better match the art direction of the game.
3. Fixed spots where cars got stuck by refining collider placements in the arena and lobby.

UI Development

Although our focus as developers was more towards functionality and gameplay systems, we also took the hit of doing most of the UI work—though under stress. Since we were not receiving regular input and functional assets from the design side, we ended up coding most of the in-game UI stuff ourselves during the final push to submission. 

1.  The main menu coincidentally is an AI-generated placeholder and utilized to inject order into the front end.
2.  In-game UI (health, storm warnings, timers, camera overlays) was manually hand-coded and constructed manually by us using fundamental Unity building blocks. 
3.  Parts were implemented without a final polish due to time and dependency limitations. Even as a gameplay programmer, I adapted to handle these non-core tasks to have a whole, testable, and playable game. This is the nature of small team development—we don multiple hats to get the game out on time.

https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/vfx/particles/environment/ez-tornado-203025 Sandstom asset