Week 12 - UI / Polish

This week featured some new levels and a testing session for the game!

What I’ll be discussing this devlog:

• Built 3 new levels
• Added a help screen
• Player Feedback from testing session
• Updated UI
• New sprites

Progress:

New difficult level

This week I endeavoured to make a new more difficult level that incorporated a new ball and new gameplay logic. For this level you had to get the red ball to drop into the red bucket and the normal ball into the normal bucket at the same time for the level to complete.

This required a new version of the level complete code to incorporate this logic and some logic to respawn the red ball when the normal ball was shot.

This level was inspired by a level in ‘Cannonball Follies 3’ and I feel extremely good in how it feels compared to the original.

Cannonball Follies 3: Cold Front (Cartoon Network, 2007)

Testing session:

This week included a testing session in class which meant I was able to watch some of my class mates play my game which was really great especially to get immediate feedback. My first bit of feedback was that my power bar UI was broken on levels 2 and 3. Luckily I was able to very quickly fix that (some sprites became unlinked to my code) and rebuild the game in a few minutes.

Also got some feedback that one of the players immediately perceived the red ball and bucket as bad and to be avoided which is kind of true. It wasn’t something I had immediately thought of.

Also got some feedback relating to the height of the camera and that it may not need to go higher than the base camera view.

I also got some great feedback from Ian regarding level 3 (my new level) that because it require the two balls to be in the buckets on the same shot that some UI such as 0/2 would help suggest to the player what was required. Some other ideas brought up was some sort of golf like scoring system, which I think I will implement with some form of ball tracking.

The following piece of feedback…

... Led to me to build some more levels following the testing session.

Two new levels:

The first new level I built after the feedback was designed introducing the red ball and red bucket earlier and started as simply hitting the target to drop the red ball.

Building off of that idea, I took inspiration from a level from Cannonball Follies 3 and used the moving obstacles to add a level of complexity and timing to the level.

Cannonball Follies 3: Cold Front (Cartoon Network, 2007)

To wrap up the new levels, I made a new level inspired by the original game – with an original new sprite.

I made a simple pachinko styled set of obstacles to get in the way of the bucket.

I designed the sprite of the pegs in Aseprite.

UI and Menus:

This week in the area of UI and Menus most of my time was spent updating the level selector and main menus and making sure each new level was linked.

The level selector looks similar but has new buttons for each new level.

The main work I implemeted a help section on the main menu and a help button that appears in the top right of each level. Each help section gives the players the control scheme in game.

The button was simply made with some assets I found online - Pixel Art GUI Elements & MinimalPixel font by Mounir Tohami on Itch.io.

What's next?

If time is forgiving to me I would like to make some more levels but I am aware of the passage of time and how unfair it can be.

I'm going to take a good stab at sound and music this week and see how it can affect the game's feeling and theme.

References:

Cannonball Follies 3:  Cold Front (Web) [Video game]. (2007) . Cartoon Network.

Mounir Tohami. Pixel Art GUI Elements from Itch.io. https://mounirtohami.itch.io/pixel-art-gui-elements

Mounir Tohami. MinimalPixel font from Itch.io.  https://mounirtohami.itch.io/minimalpixel-font

Fontense. (n.d.). Horizon Wide Sans Serif [Font]. Creative Market. https://creativemarket.com/fontense/2189003-Horizon-Wide-Sans-Serif

Adwitr. Health Bar Asset Pack from itch.io [https://adwitr.itch.io/pixel-health-bar-asset-pack]

Nicolaspla77. Cannon from itch.io [https://nicolaspla77.itch.io/can]

CraftPix.net. Moon and Sea Pixel Art Background from OpenGameArt.org  [https://opengameart.org/content/moon-and-sea-pixel-art-background]

https://orama-interactive.itch.io/pixelorama

https://www.aseprite.org/