We had a lot of art changes recently in order to mitigate player confusion. The most altered sections are the HUD and tutorial page. Visuals have a big impact on whether or not a player will know what to do. Lewis made sure to add a select your number of players and changed the wording for the player select screen in order to help guide the player. We even removed the animated instructions and replaced it with a tutorial level to slowly introduce mechanics. The HUD was completely redone for the most part.  Player HUD is something that I made sure to focus a lot on and have my personal final drafts done for when we were play testing. It is often neglected despite being one of the most essential parts of game design. Players need to know how and why the things they interact with are effecting them. Buttons were made more visible and colour coded to aid players. With the addition of powerups, we wanted players to have a place to tell who is effected by what; so, we added changing HUD. When players pick up guns, the gun next to the shoot key alters to match this, also the player head acts as a notification for both death and effects now. For powerups like bullet speed, this may not be as noticeable. So, we added various pngs that can communicate who and what is affected by various mechanics. We ran into many visual issues while developing the game, especially since this is in the top down perspective. None of us have much experience in that style of design. For example, the original portal was redone to look like a black hole in the ground instead of the classic vertical gate. Also, powerups and buildings had to be rotated and adjusted to much more visible. Everything we made had to be modeled and designed from that perspective, something that is very unnatural. 

Here are some screenshots to demonstrate the changes. The portal originally had particle animations as well but there have been issues that we are trouble shooting now. This was the original quick portal design that acted as a place holder and study for me to learn how to model with particles in maya.