UI & Polish

The font I used was supposed to imitate glass refraction initially, just because I was not quite sure what to use. Some people have said this reduces readability, but not significantly enough to warrant change. Figure 1 shows the colour shadow effect on the title, I think it looks cool personally. For the title I wanted to make it a bit fancier, so I added some shadows of each channel. While this also does not help with readability, it fits the theme well enough without making me create a custom image for the title. The background of the menus is the concept art for the game, since it was the largest image I had. I think it fits well enough for now.

Figure 1, title text

The settings menu was originally just a list of three buttons, one to clear game data, one to enable cheats and one to disable them. Someone rightfully pointed out that this was a bit redundant as a checkbox would work. However, after this prompt I realised that I didn't want a disable cheats button at all. So, I just ended up removing the disable button entirely. A bit later I decided to add two new tabs to the settings menu, "Graphics" and "Audio", containing the Post-Processing and Volume settings respectively. These use sliders and checkboxes as they can be changed over and over, unlike cheats. Currently these are not stylised and use the unity defaults but are functional.

The pause menu (Figure 2) uses very similar layouts to the original settings menu, with options to go back to the menu, get hints or go back to the map. The hint system opens into a second section to offer a series of hints before returning you to the pause menu. Since some people are playing in full screen, I bound P to the pause menu as well as escape, so that you do not have to exit full screen to access it. The lens interaction gets added later once the player collects either the basic or advanced lens, appearing to the right of the pause menu. This was a bit complicated to get working because of shader issues with the pins, but it works now. I also had issues getting the lines to connect properly in the pause menu layer without affecting everything, but eventually fixed it.

Figure 2, pause menu

The most time-consuming general polish features have come from the improved control system, smoothing between game states and sounds. For the control system, I allowed holding a button for about a second to instantly keep pressing the button to move or undo quickly. I also allowed a certain number of button presses (3) to be queued up to hopefully not ignore too many inputs the player wanted to make (e.g. going in a circle is now very consistent and easy). This control system then feeds into the smoothing, which effectively takes a snapshot of where each object is at the beginning of the step and records the end position before smoothing between them. This does not smooth sprites or things that were created or destroyed, but it does solve the issues presented by things like pushing multiple boxes at once and photons being hard to keep track of. Along with these changes I needed to introduce sound to make it easier to keep track of when thing happen and make the game generally more engaging. Most important objects have sounds associated with them that play when they are triggered, and some specific sounds, like for movement and pressing UI buttons, continue to play even between scenes.

Figure 3, showing the smoothed movement of objects (note that prisms create new photons and are not smoothed)