This week I focused on polishing UI elements. I began the week with a UI system that was stuck half way between a new and old UI layout. I’ve had some changes on my backlog of work for a while, so I figured as we got ready to make a commercial for the game, it was important to go back through the game and make sure UI elements felt polished and the game itself was being polished.
I started off my fixing some menus which were broken from when I updated the background for the main menu, previously I used a solid blue background, and just changed the overlaid text based on which menu I was accessing. This wasn’t sufficient when I added a proper pixel art background, and necessitated an updated appearance. Changing the appearance itself caused a few issues that had to be fixed, such as a race condition when accessing Coop -> Host, the application would race to open the Join menu, rather than Host menu due to a bug I introduced.
Overall I feel like the game is beginning to feel more polished, I haven’t changed very many things about the core gameplay loop or codebase, but have been focusing primarily on polish UI, make sure everything feels correct, and I’ve noticed that it has a much large effect on the game then I previously realized.