User Interface / Polish

What's in the Current Build?

Look, progress on the game has been somewhat lacking. A combination of about 10% sickness, 30% other classes, 30% overestimating the time I had, and 30% overestimating my own ability has lead to me being rather disappointed in the final product I've produced, I'll admit. That being said, we still have some additions to talk about. 

User Interface

We have a UI! It currently consists of arrow keys in the top right that are overlaid with icons of the abilities that each arrow key will trigger.

The icon only appears when each ability is obtained, and they have a nice and smooth fade back to solid colour after being used to indicate when they're ready to use again. 

I do think it might be hard to tell exactly when an ability is ready to use again, which might lead to some frustration in high precision / timing based scenarios. For now though, I'm happy with this fairly simple, yet I think fairly elegant UI addition. 

Furthermore, we have a help screen and an ability to toggle it! I can guarantee that there's an oversight somewhere in my code that allows for the player to still move/interact while the help screen is up, or something like that. It's currently just a very simple toggle that sets visibility for the help screen, sets the player's velocity to 0, and takes away their ability to move. I know for a fact that the rest of the world still works while the screen is up, but for this simple build, it is effective enough. 

Polish

In terms of polish, we finally have some background art.

I tried to invoke sort of an arcane, wibbly-wobbly magic realm feel with it, almost space-like? I'm not massively pleased with how it came out, but it's certainly better than the default blue we were working with up until now. It currently just stays statically in the background, if I were to develop it further I'd definitely like to add some form of parallax scrolling, tidy it up a bit, and maybe add some animations or effects to really invoke a sense of wonder and of being in a foreign, magical, interplanar place. For now, it will have to do. 

What's Next in the Pipeline?

Well... nothing, really. We're all out of time, I'm afraid. Besides writing up some thoughts on where to take the game based on player feedback and writing a comparison of how the game ended up versus my original pitch, there are a few things that I do wish I had time to do. 

• I never did get around to addressing that very specific edge case about not being able to jump if you land right on the very, very edge of a platform. 
• The abilites could do with some fine tuning, and of course I only implemented 3, much fewer than the 8 I originally intended. 
• There's still a problem with slipping into the floor very briefly after falling at high speed. 
• I never got around to making animations.
• More that I'm sure I'm forgetting

Unfortunately, we won't have time for those, at least not right now. There's a possibility that I'll tinker with this project from time to time, but I doubt it will see much more development. And that's okay I think. Not every project has to see a 'proper end'. Unfinished projects are still valuable in the lessons they taught.