Coalesce Polish and UI

This week's focus was on polish and UI. A few mechanics were tweaked (the paddles now have more force for example), but the major changes were to the User Interface

Menu Graphics

New graphics were made for the main menu. These can be seen below and are in keeping with the style of the game. I chose slightly darker colors to help the title and level stand out, and also to differentiate the background from that of the game itself.

In-Game UI Elements

Several in-game UI elements were added, such as a restart button and a timer.

The back to main menu button was the first element to be added. For first time players, getting stuck in a particularly hard level because they could not complete it would be exceedingly frustrating.

The timer was added next, but it became frustrating if a player was shooting for a  high score but their run was already bad, as they would be required to exit the level to restart. The restart button was added to allow the player to skip this tedious step. Of note: there is no actual high score table and high scores are not recorded anywhere in the current build. Such a feature is not high on the list of priorities.

All of these buttons hover and change color when the player hovers their cursor on them, providing a little extra feedback.

Level Complete Screen

When the player has completed a level, instead of kicking the player straight back to the menu, the game pauses until they select to replay or go back to the main menu. It also displays some text to ensure the player understands the level is over. 

This serves two purposes:

• Scene transitions are less jarring now that the player is not kicked out of the level straight away.
• The player has time to take note of their time, which is especially important without the existence of a high score table.

It is worth nothing that a high score table would make a lot of sense considering the targeted mobile/browser game audience, as they could compare their scores to others online. A high score table would certainly be a feature in a full release version of this game, but the time invested into making such a feature is great much for the last week of this project.