Major UI Update!


Hi!  I've been waiting a long time to push these enhancements because I wanted the updated experience to feel consistent and complete.  Almost every UI asset in the game has been reworked to have a little more personality, and I've added features like a gameplay manual and records page.  This took a lot of development hours :)!


I've included a screenshot of the new pause menu below, which now contains the level name and how much money the player has earned (in-game currency of course)!

New Level Pause Menu


I've added UI to the level select screen, which now displays the player's funds in the upper right corner and information about the selected level including the level number, name, wind speed, high score, and medal earned.  There's a part of me that enjoys the level select screen without this extra UI too, so I intend to add an option in the future to hide the UI, but please note that I don't intend to add enhancements to the options menu for quite some time unless there's a high demand for it.


The feature I'm probably most excited about is the gameplay manual.  I built a game with a lot of mechanics that aren't used in many other games (at least not games I know about), so I wanted the player to be able to review a description of how to play at any time without having to exit a level or access a resource outside of the game.  Mechanics that haven't been unlocked yet will show as question marks, and newly unlocked entries will have a dot next to them.


This is mostly an attempt at future-proofing my game since this feature probably won't be as useful in  the demo, but I'm hoping the final game will contain many levels, and I wanted to create a menu that would function as a quick way to identify high scores and medals earned for each level without having to access the levels directly.  Levels that haven't been unlocked yet display as question marks, and the records page is accessible any time from the pause menu, just like the gameplay manual.


I've added a notification popup when one or more new entries have been added to the gameplay manual.  While I think this popup will be helpful for new players, I imagine some people will get tired of it, so I intend to include an option in the future to disable them, although each notification should only display once.




Many of these new updates have been part of my initiative to improve the onboarding experience of my game, and my work on that front is not done.  I still intend to make the tutorial at the beginning  more palatable by splitting it into parts and incorporating it into the story of my game.  However, please note that this will take a long time since I am a one person team, and I am trying to do quality work, but I may push one or two smaller updates to the game in the meantime.

Thank you so much for taking an interest in the work that I do!  As always, constructive feedback is appreciated!

Files

Midnight Muffin Delivery Service.zip Play in browser
75 days ago

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