February Update
Posted: March 3rd, 2009 | Author: pixy | Filed under: BubbleTouch, DevBlog | Tags: BubbleTouch | No Comments »During February Bubble Touch has not evolved as expected since we are focus our development on Menus and in order to fix code, simplify it and make it more readable and reusable.
Game Menu:
We are finally complete the design of the game menu including the ones used to access to levels and play it. As described in previous posts after the user click on the play button, he/she can choose a planet, and hence a level to play with.
We are trying to create menu that are simply to understand and use it immediately. Personally I think that an iPhone game must be immediate to play and understand without any further explanation. After dowload a game from the App Store I would like to immediately play with it and have fun, without losing time to understand what can I do. The first 2/3 minutes of playing are extremely important especially for Bubble Touch which wants to be a game that can be played even for some minutes per day.
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The Planet selection Menu is extremely simple, any reachable planets is displayed and animated, while the not reachable planets shows only its shadow (or shape):
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After select a planet the user select a level in a map clicking on a piece of the map. This menu is not fully completed and some GFX has to be re-done, especially the graphics connected with the map.
After clicking on a reachable piece of map (i.e. a Level) on the left appear the level options: if a level has been played and completed the highscore will be shown. To simplify the visualization of the highscore and give a better idea of the score we are using stars:
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We are also working on the result page, that gives the information about level after the user has finish to play with it.
A WIP screenshot:
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The level objective screen (menu) has to be redesign in order to be more immediate to understand (we are working on it in this week).
Code refactoring
We are spending a lot of times in refactor the internal code of Bubble Touch in order to be more OO and more readable and easy to use (even for the future projects).
We are also cleaning up the code to have some little performance improvements, but we will focusing on speed at the end of the project.
PVR Texture and Texture Atlas
Bubble Touch nows can load PVR Texture and have a strong Texture Atlas support. We use a lot of atlas for the game and the menu, hence we spend some times on improved the use of atlas and make it simpler.
March Plans:
On March we would like to have a first Planet fully completed and in general we would like to improve:
- Sound SFX support
- Level gameplay: bonus, malus, new features
If you have any idea about a cool features that can improve the gameplay, feel free to comment this post !
See you soon,
PiXy / PixMapBrothers
) my brothers on writing code. 
