Polishing (Dev #2)

The game has progressed a fair bit and we've now entered the polishing and wrapping up stage. This means that we've finished most of the main content and now we have to tie up systems like Main Menu, Save & Load, Settings, and so on. Also take the time to improve graphics and other tiny things everywhere.

Progress

Levels are done! ːwinter2019happyyulː

We have created and finished all the levels that we want to release with. 15 levels, all with unique art and different track or premise. However, there's still a lot that can be done on these levels. Tiny touches and polishing to make the experience better.

We have also locked in the overworld progression for the levels, and in the progress we even got some ideas for possible future levels.

Main Menu

We've started working on the new main menu. Up to this point we've had the same one from Ludum Dare version. Here's a sneak peak of how it looks now:

It is fully animated but we'll save that to when the game releases :)

Resolutions & Aspect Ratios

If you're keen on aspect ratios, you'll notice that the main menu screenshot is 21:9. So I think this is a great time to talk about our journey with dealing on scaling the game to fit into different screens.

Our Ludum Dare version was locked and designed at 960x600, which is 16:10. It was meant to be played on the browser without the need to go full-screen. While this is great for a web game, it doesn't quite fit when you go into Steam. On a Steam game people expect a full-screen game at any resolution.

We started tinkering with what kind of resolutions we wanted to support. Knowingly that many people will for the most part have a 16:9 or 16:10 screen we could have just scaled up. But in order to future proof the game a little bit, we decided to support wider screens as more and more people have them. So the game will support up to 21:9 wide-screen resolutions. Initially we even considered about 32:9 but the amount of effort vs 'wasted art' that only a handful would see didn't seem worth it.

The playable game area still has to fit within 16:9, and that also happens to be the maximum aspect ratio at which our computer screens can reach anyway :) All this said, the game should also be playable at lower resolutions since we still once in a while take a peek of how it would look at our original 960x600 resolution.