Week 8 - Start Screen, Pause, raising the arena

Still working on getting a decent placement for my camera and green screen but here’s some gameplay.

Ok, I don’t have a lot to talk about this week.

I implemented a pause button, and a new start screen. The start screen is still a little buggy, but I’ll investigate and fix later.

I started working on a new scoreboard, but decided that the one I had right now was fine and I couldn’t get the higher perspective experiment that I did last week out of my mind. Thinking about my main influence, Tetris Effect, one of the things that it does is the environment changes in response t the game so I thought I would try making it so that the arena slowly rises higher in the air with every brick that you break. I think it’s a nice compromise so I’m going to keep it. I ended up needing to add a lot more buildings to fill out the “city” and there is a bit of a performance hit for doing this, but I feel like I can optimize this. It’s only really noticable when doing mixed reality capture and I think I can fix it relatively easily.

I think I’ve got the broad-strokes for this game in place, it mostly needs to be filled-out, polished and fixed up. I think I’ve got something to iterate on without needing to really focus on a big feature right now. I do eventually want to create a couple more environments for the arena, and to do that I’m going to need to up my modelling skills instead of relying on purchasing/contracting out that work, so I’m going to make that a bit of a priority right now instead of big feature work. My goals each week for the next little bit will be to build 2 brick layouts, two bugfixes and two 3D model (might not even use the first few, just follow a tutorial to gain some skills).