There's lots of polishing to go, but Vinyl is in a really great state right now. Over the last two weeks since this semester started my continued focus has been to improve the menus since we've mostly got the gameplay locked down. Top priority has been getting animations into the menus, and we now have the Main Menu almost fully animated. It's incredible how much of a difference it makes. The Pause screen during gameplay is also looking great, but the Song Selection screen is in dire need of updating. I'm hoping to be able to complete that by the end of the week if we can get the rest of the assets.
I also worked on the leaderboards a bit more to ensure that if they do fail we're handling that in a good way so the game continues to run and the player is notified of the problem. We've also been reworking score mechanics trying to come up with a system that feels good and is as understandable to a player as it needs to be. A large part of this was changing how the filters impact score as they were previously far too large of an impact compared to everything else. Our new system simply activates a multiplier, which had the added benefit of us not needing to display as much text on the screen. A side effect of this, however, was that it became harder to tell if you'd managed to hit a filter after the first one or not. To address this, I added another particle effect that plays when you hit one to make it visually obvious.
