Week 24 - Aesthetics, ui, design, oh my!

Hey everyone, and welcome back to another exciting Juicy Dev week! This week I've been hard at work finishing off the Main Menu screen as well as the Credits screen. On top of that, I've also managed to implement a 'pre-loading' screen which helps each screen load and transition correctly. But, before I get into "nitty-gritty" of things, I would like to mention again about all of the helpful feedback I've received, particularly about my UI designs. Yes, I did say this last week, but since then, I have refined the UI EVEN further with the suggestions mentioned. At this stage, I am really happy with how it is looking, and I hope you do as well.
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Left is the first refined UI and Right is the Final UI Design

The hardest part of this week was to balance this game's development with other personal commitments. It's been a pretty hectic week with both jobs wrapping up for the year, and with more work coming in over the Christmas break. On top of that, I really wanted to get the UI right, so coming up with designs which thematically made sense, fit the game style, fit the design goals, and had clear readability was a bit of a challenge. However, after all that, everything else seemed to have worked pretty well for me. The buttons implemented nicely, the animations came up better than I expected, the menu screens Illustrations came up nicely, and the 'pre-loading' screen worked quite well. 

On the topic of the 'Pre-loader', I wanted to show you what it basically looks like in and out of the game itself. I decided to add a simple animation rather than a loading bar, since, I feel makes it more personal and a little bit more 'thematic'. 

Another element I worked on this week was the main menu, although not much of it. I basically tweaked some of the elements in the foreground to obstruct less of the menu UI (Bomb shifted slightly more to the left). 

I really enjoyed coming up with a design for the credits screen, and i think it has turned out pretty well considering the time constraint.

Besides these implementations, I don't think I have done much else this week. I know I've still yet to fix the in-game system (such as the reward placement, and the actual game-play), but all in all i'm happy with the progress. I'm hoping next week that I will be able to finish all of the Menu and UI implementations, and hopefully focus on the game itself. Then I need to think about sound.... fun.

Until next week,

Thanks for reading!