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The interface has been improved, with fancy new fonts, icons & other extra details:
Birds have been textured, the wind compass looks ever-so-slightly less placeholder-ey, and I've added a bit of a subtle glow to the bag itself- because I noticed it could sometimes be quite hard to see on a small mobile screen!
Also, as you may or may not be able to figure out from the mute button on the first pic, I've added music & sounds too! Nothing completely self-produced, but I did do some editing of the impact, gusts, quacks & ambient sounds to get them exactly how I wanted them. The gust sound in particular has some special logic behind it- it'll play louder & lower-pitch as the player does bigger swipes, so that they really sound quite different to short, quick gusts.
(I also really need to add an actual 'pause' menu of sorts now, as you currently can't mute/unmute the game after you've started it...)
I've done a lot of work on the turbulence system, tweaking all the parameters to feel interesting- though I may need to adjust the difficulty somewhat still as I've been the sole tester & I'm probably getting fairly good at the controls as a result! Although, I did adjust the turbulence strength to scale depending on your distance- so it should be a bit calmer as you're just getting started. (Probably need to scale the chance of gusts appearing in the same way too, as they're pretty brutal when you're just getting going...)
The bag also gets lots more shaky at higher altitudes, though this is mostly just aesthetic for now- I'm considering adding in more dangerous aerial obstacles higher up too, maybe planes or something? Anyone got any good suggestions?
Also, look out for occasional dangerous duck formations! (...hmm, perhaps I need to stagger their animations, they're a bit toooo uniform like that)
Finally, I've just whipped up a quick 'test' screen to make it easier to look at each of my assets & make sure they're all correct- that all the hitboxes have been set up properly, buildings have been positioned correctly in their level set pieces, and so on.
I've been meaning to do this for awhile & really should have gotten around to it sooner, but at least it'll help with finalizing the last few assets & confirming that everything's been coded correctly.
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In the next week or two I'll be making the Game Over sequence a bit more spectacular. It's now got a decently satisfying 'thwack' sound (or a 'quack' sound, depending on what you hit...), but it should hopefully become much more visually stunning too! I also hope to make it clearer to new players what you actually need to do, either with a help screen or a simple toggleable 'tutorial' mode- so, as always, watch this space!
Hooray for progress :)
- Lig
