It has been a while since my last update on my iPhone game. I haven’t had much time in the previous month to work on Yuckfu, but development is now on full speed again!
As you can see, I refined the graphics quite a bit. The edges of the playing area are now colored to make it clearer where your robot is and where the walls are. I also added the effect for spawning containers which looks great in motion. It’s actually a real 3D model with a rotating spiral.
For the HUD, I wanted a clean and simple solution that is showing only the information you really need. I ended up with mainly two elements: the score on the left, your energy on the right. As your energy is decreasing over time, the energy bar tells you at a glance how much you’ve got left. The four little boxes next to the score shows the “multiplier”. If you collect several containers in a row your multiplier increases and you get more points.
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The nice thing of having a minimalist layout is that you can change the complete look of your site with relatively little effort. Still, this redesign took a while. I spent most of the time to come up with something I liked and then some more to throw it away and start over again.
One of my goals for this redesign was to improve readability. Since most of this Blog’s content is text – not images or videos – it didn’t really make sense to have a dark background like the old design in the first place. The result probably won’t win any awards for creativity, but it’s functional.
I learned a lot about typography and classical grid layouts in last few months, so I tried to apply some of it here (I'm still at the “I don't need InDesign; I can build my print layouts in Pages!” stage). The most obvious change is probably the font size. I'm now using a huge 16px base font that really isn’t that huge. I also switched to Helvetica/Arial which looks so much nicer on the headlines than Trebuchet-MS did.
There were also some bugs and quirks under the hood that were in desperate need of getting fixed. It should be all working now. If you still find something that looks odd, please let me know.
