Tutorials

Today I found some time to work on the tutorials. Some levels, especially those in the tutorial stage, will feature overlays at certain points of play that inform the player of objectives or provide explanation.

The challenge with any mobile game is  that it has to be able to be picked up immediately with almost no learning curve, even when there are complexities that have to be communicated somehow. Players also

The technical solution I settled on was to make full screen images in Photoshop (which actually take up very little space due to most of the images being transparent).

Each image generally comprises some text (strategically placed) and one or more hand drawn arrows indicating the focus of the message.

Introductions

Basic controls

The coding aspect then loads each image at runtime and either align with left, centre or right edge of the screen. The images also need the ability to appear at the right time, need to persist on the screen for a variable length of time depending on how much there is to read and alpha fade in and out smoothly, all while halting the game.

All of this works now, but I really struggle with finding a nice way to let the player skip individual or all help messages.... work in progress. Also I can't finalise the images until I have levels to put them into. I am also not happy with the artistic style of the arrows I have drawn as they don't really match anything else in the game (and they really are quite ugly to boot!)... ho-hum. I'll have to revisit this later.