This week ends early for me. Tomorrow I will go to the Spiel in Essen, and see whats new in the world of boardgames. My Milestone this week was called visually polished alpha, and I am not quite where I wanted to be yet.
Yesterday and the day before:
The day before yesterday was travelling. When I reached home, I felt not yet ready, but I did not continue working because there was some immediate stuff to do at home.
Yesterday I went to for an appointment in the morning, and see some friends in the early afternoon. Another half a day, and not ideal. But at my friends, I at least gathered some early feedback from them, and finally – FINALLY – found out why one particular nasty bug was happenening when watching them play. I could not reproduce it at home before, but when seeing them I noticed, how they swiped over the UI.
Today stuff got done:
Today in the morning I had another appointment… stuff that kills your time. But well. afterwards I immediately got into fixing said defect. Afterwards I finalized the train animation I was working on during the last days. Now, when a solution is found (in the positive case), a train rides the way across the screen.
Since I know, users might not want to see and wait for it after one or two times, I implemented a skip button.
I also started with a basic menu and a solution rating screen, but I am not yet convinced about the basic art I am using there. There will be some rework happening, when I find my joy of painting.
Overall the main loop looks at least somewhat polished, or rather primed. I want to add a coal car and a passenger car to the train, but I could not get the animation done in time, so the train rides solo for now. The menus need work.
I am really looking forward to improving the artwork, and adding some animations. I think with the steampunk theme, there is a lot room for creativity, and I will have to see how much time I should really allocate for that, but I guess the visuals need to be attractive, so there can almost not be too little.
