Week 28 - Dem Power-Ups Yo!

Welcome to another week of Juicy Development. Throughout the last couple of weeks I've been hard at work refining and polishing up the Indomitable power-up and pick-up system. The pick-up is working quite well now, which i'm happy with, but the button itself still needs a little more refinement. The challenges I faced when designing the button was coming up with the placement of the 'quantity' icon (the little display telling the player how many of these items they have at any given time). Initially I came up with a few design ideas which I still felt were lacking in appeal, so I took it to social media and asked for some professional opinions. The feedback I received was amazing, and really helped to flesh out the design.

After delving into readability, contrast, and style with the community, I ended up with this final design which I'm pretty happy with. 

It doesn't obstruct the button, nor does it take up too much real estate on the screen, it's fairly easy to read (the numbers wont be that close together), it supports colourblind players and the design of the tab works well with the values being displayed.

After refining the style of the button, I then needed to incorporate how the button functions. again, it wasn't too hard to do this. In fact, the hardest part of this was to make it 'feel' like a very powerful button (juiciness). I'm still playing around with the animations and effects, but I'm slowly getting there. Below is a snippet of what the button looks like in game and when you receive it from a bonus roll.

On the topic of bonus rolls, I've now incorporated a new bonus event mechanic which allows players the opportunity to spend their coins on bonus loot such as bonus coins, double coins next round, a chance to revive and a chance to receive an indomitable power-up. I'm hoping to include more of these mechanics further down the track, but at the moment, I feel there are a sufficient amount of rewards.

The next step after this is to swap out the current character actor with a 'Spine2D' system using a file called '.json'. Rather than a whole stack of sprite sheets, the .json file holds all the separate parts of the character in one image. It then plugs each part of the character together and animates them in a way which looks like a fully animated character. This will save SO much time and processing that creating new and innovating characters will be a breeze! It will take some time to overwrite the current character system, but I think, with a little elbow grease, I'll be able to get the job done! But for now that's basically it!

Until Next time!

Thanks for reading.