Welcome to “This Week in Development”, a (hopefully) weekly summary of work done on the game this week!

I’m hoping this’ll keep things interesting in the run-up to the release of The Big One, and hopefully give more insight into what’s coming and the development process.

So what’s happened this Week in Development?

I’ve been putting a significant amount of effort into a very major task: Redesigning the User Interface

While it’s true that the current UI isn’t technically the worst, it is certainly far from the best. I’ve been really working hard to clean it up, make it prettier and fill it with juicy action!

To begin with, I’ve been working on the Main Menu and the Options Page.

These bits are probably the bits you’ll see the least, bit are probably the most important bits in the game.

We’ll start with the title screen.

Here’s what it is currently like:

And here’s what I’ve been working on:

It’s pretty similar, right? Well, that’s to keep it familiar for current players, plus I think it looked pretty nice before anyway.

There are a couple of differences of course – I’ve updated the main font to keep things more readable (though the title font will stay the same, since I really love it), colors have been tweaked and I animated all of the buttons when you press them. A still image doesn’t really show that though. It’s not quite finished (for one, it’s still in the test environment) so I still have a couple of other minor adjustments to do.

I want to update the icons, replacing them with vectors that can be converted to “Signed Distance Fields” to keep them sharp and pretty at any screen size, plus I need to move some buttons around, since I have found some phones (including mine!) have an input delay in some corners of the screen, which is a little weird to say the least.

Next up is the options menu. First, let’s look at the old one:

It sorta works, but it’s a bit annoying to navigate and the colors aren’t great.

Introducing The New One:

Yes, it’s completely different. All options have been organized into separate categories, the overall appearance is completely different and new options are being added.

Buttons, sliders and switches are much clearer and visually appealing. And that border does look somehow familiar…

This has been a great place to start since the options menu contains the most different types of thing, and is the most likely place to find bugs

Oh, the little popups are also getting updated!

So that’s where we are this week! I know it’s kinda small, but it’s the start of some important stuff! It may be a bit slow next week as there are some performance issues with the new UI that I really need to take care of before moving on to more stuff – next up will be the Match-3 game UI.

Nests and the birdipedia are getting something a little… different so they’ll take take a little bit longer to get ready.

Thanks for reading!