Vinyl, Information Overload!

This last week my focus was to improve the flow of information to the player.  This happened through two primary means: a new play screen, and a new stats screen.

Play screen:
Instead of the songs being listed on the main menu, they now have their own screen.  This allowed for added information on the songs such as duration, difficulty, and high scores.  Additionally, players can now sort the song list by any of these parameters making it much easier to find and compare songs.

(Note: This is actually the most recent version of the song selection screen.  At the time of writing this blog it was just the inside song buttons and all the other buttons floating in blackness.)

Stats screen:
The stats screen shows up after the player finishes a song and contains the majority of the information dump.  It displays the score the player got not he song in addition to the top 10 online high scores for that song.  It also tells the player what their maximum streak was, how many obstacles they hit, and how many filters they collected.  Finally, it also lets them know how many times they jumped and for how many seconds they used both boosting and scratching.

We also did a bit more designing on Vinyl this week to add in the ability for the player to select the music effect of the filters and the enhancements at the start of the song and at intervals throughout it.  This allows the player a bit more agency in listening to their music while playing the game.

Vinyl, Break Week

This week has been fairly uneventful since people have been winding down since last week's mad rush.  We've spent the majority of your time looking into bugs that crash the game.  The vast majority of these seem to be caused by PD failing to launch correctly so we've been trying to come up with a way to deal with this and see if it fixes most of the problems.

Additionally, I've been looking into alternate color schemes for the obstacles so that they're easier to see once the full color effect is in place.  The current ones I've settled on that I like are a dusky orange, teal, and green.  All of the obstacles are lighter than the streak they leave on the track so it helps pop them out.

I've also started implementing the skeleton of the stats screen we want to display at the end of each song to inform the player of how well they've done, as well as to provide a location where they learn more about the dev team though a link to our web page.

We're aiming for feature complete on Nov 26th, so we have just 3 weeks to wrap up the remainders of the game.  We're close to that already, but the few things we do want to add are likely going to be pretty work intensive so there may be some crunching in the coming weeks.

Vinyl, now in IGF!!

Last week was a huge week filled with loads of work to get the build ready for IGF.  Our first submission went up on Tuesday and was mostly comprised of tweaking and fine tuning all the little issues we could think of.  This gave us a posted build that we knew would be in by the deadline, but we hoped to submit another, more polished one on Thursday if we could.

That night I sent out the build to my brother and a friend in France and got a ton of great feedback on the build, mostly relating to future goals since there wouldn't be enough time to get it in for IGF (and because huge changes that close to a deadline is a terrible ideas), but also some excellent feedback from new time users such as how to play a song not being apparent enough.

Thursday the professors sat down with the game and gave us a lot of feedback as well along with a list of changes they felt were mandatory for the IGF submission.  Most of these changes related to the menus and UI so I sat down and got all of them into the game within a few hours, allowing us to get the submission in that night, right before the deadline.

The most important of these changes were making so that the first song in the list is automatically selected, making the play button colored differently, making it so that a loaded song is automatically selected and scrolled to in the list, and the addition of a power bar to the in game UI so the player can easily tell how much power they have at any given time.

I'm super happy with the latest build and can see where this game is going at last.  I think we're going to have a really awesome final product.