A Few Changes

In the last post there were a few changes in the game. Most notable, I'm leaning toward changing the name of the game. When searching for games in the app store, 'flux' had been used quite a bit. Fluxx was also used. I couldn't find any games currently named fluxo, so it seems safe for now. We'll go with that unless a better name comes along.

The other slight change was in the player's shape. To distinguish it from the other non player shapes in the game, I'm putting a small triangle, circle, or square in the middle like so:

It seemed necessary to do this since the shapes would be changing during gameplay, sometimes rapidly. Hopefully this becomes clear as to what the player's shape is at any given moment.

 

Refining the Start Screen

After trying to explain the start screen to my brother, I've made a few changes. We're prototyping that right now.

After opening the app, the load screen will appear. The bar below the logo represents the load bar.

When the game finishes loading, all but the word 'fluxo' goes away, and 'fluxo' turns green. The green fire button and the joystick appear in a rectangle representing the non playable area.  The player has control of the triangle. Hopefully at this point the player moves the triangle, plays around with the green button, which shoots a green bullet, and ultimately shoots the word fluxo. If, when we test this with people, the player fails to shoot the word 'fluxo' and is confused as to what to do, we can try animating the word fluxo, hopefully prompting the player to shoot the moving word, or we can put a '?' at the bottom center of the non playable area that, when tapped, pulls up a help menu explaining what needs to be done.

If the player hits the word fluxo, it will change to a red 'start'. Hopefully the player then shoots and hits the word start. 

When the player hits the word 'start', the player loses control and a white box with the following shapes appear.

The shapes blink a few times, and animate down toward the bottom of the screen above the timer. A level appears as well as a second shape. Once all elements are on the screen, a 3-2-1 countdown appears in the middle of the screen. When it counts down to 0, the timer starts, the other shape starts to move, and the game begins. 

 Again, the purpose of this start screen is to teach the mechanics of the game in hopefully a simple, intuitive way. I'd like to try to do so without words, tutorials, or prompts.