Post-Processing Effect We thought it's time to finally do some post-processing to spice up the look of the game and to break away from the somewhat flat color tone. There was much experimentation, and we eventually settled on changing the hue and saturation towards the bottom of the screen so it looks like the landscape is reflecting light. Here's the comparison (before & after): We try to keep the effect subtle in order to not draw too much attention away from the puzzle. In fact, we're thinking of making the constellations stand out more by implementing glow - so that's something to look forward to! =D
Glow Finally added some glow to the constellations. Still got to tweak this further - the glow makes the white nodes look like balls of fuzz, so we'll probably have to change how they look. Also, my teammate jon fixed up the lines so they now look smoother, goodbye aliasing!
Particles Added some particle effects to emphasize the cutting of lines. The tiny particles seem to work well enough with the glow =)
Minor Tweaks Before proceeding on to adding more content, I thought it'd be a better idea to address some of the feedback we received during playtesting. One of the minor changes we've made was to reduce the size of the nodes hoping it'd look better. Before & After: Another change we added is even more subtle. It has to do with the amount of time you have to wait for the lines to reach the edge (after the final split) of the game area before the level restarts. To fix that, we gradually speed up the line after the final split. Here are the gifs for comparison: Before: After:
Each level in the game is to be cleared within a certain number of splits. Till now, we have been relying on displaying a number on the top-left corner of the screen to communicate to the players the number of splits remaining - it proves to be fairly ineffective (few people notice the label, much less read it while solving the puzzle). Consequently, we're trying a different approach to displaying the split counts, as featured below. We'll need to test this. In other news, our artist who's previously worked with us on Spacejacked has offered to help improve the looks of the game. Early mockups seem promising. It may be a while before we're done with the graphical upgrade, but we look forward to showing it to everyone once it's ready!
It's been awhile since our last update, and I thought I should at least explain why. I've recently took up a new part-time job, and the job training is taking up quite a bit of time. As for the rest of my time, I had to spend it on updating Spacejacked, which we're currently busy working on to bring to PS4. That said, please watch this space for the next update! Hopefully we'd have gotten the graphical improvements in by then! =)
Testing out new splitting-angle Wrote some code to support different splitting angles - here's one really weird one. On a separate note, we've finally gotten started(phew!) on integrating the new art assets. It'll be awhile but please look forward to it.
Revamped art assets Finally got around to integrating the new art assets - here it is! Also added functionality to scale do-dads in our level editor.
Work-in-progress World Selection Here I am testing out the very much still-in-development world selection screen. Subscribe to the TouchArcade YouTube channel We've decided upon separating the levels based on the mechanics introduced, as well as the difficulty in general.
thumbsup dudes. I did that for Singularity, separated mechanics into new "chapters", the first few stages of a new chapter would introduce the new mechanic, then the later stages will have combinations of mechanics from previous chapters. This also makes for a nice upward-zigzag difficulty curve.
Tracking progress Did a couple things for tracking progress in the game. Clicking on individual world nodes will result in the displaying of the number of levels completed in that particular node, as well as the number of stars collected. I will probably have to change the layout thanks to iPhone X's design. Subscribe to the TouchArcade YouTube channel Also made changes to the level selection screen so it now reflects which exact levels have been completed.
