User Interface / Polish

This is the fifth dev diary for my game Flappy Animals, and it's about UI and optimization.

Starting off, we've introduced background music that brings a lively and engaging ambiance to Flappy Animals. We sifted through numerous tracks to find a melody that not only complements the light-hearted, playful nature of the game but also ensures that the repetitive gameplay doesn’t become annoying to the player. The music evolves with your journey - adjusting itself as you navigate through the skies, creating an immersive experience that will keep players engaged and entertained.

With our new scorekeeping UI, players will find their current score displayed in the upper left corner of the screen as soon as they begin navigating their chosen animal through the obstacles. We ensured that the font and style of the score were clear and unintrusive, providing information without distracting from the gameplay. Once the player’s run concludes, the final score, along with game-over UI, elegantly presents itself, offering an opportunity to either restart or exit to the main menu.

We've also integrated an exciting feature allowing players to choose and change their animal’s skin before venturing into the skies. Initially, each player will start with a basic skin, but as you collect points and progress through the game, new, vibrant skins will become available, adding an additional layer of fun and personalization. The button to access the skins is intuitively placed on the starting screen, ensuring a straightforward user experience.

While our initial intent was to split the scripting work for the UI and the skin-change feature into separate entities, we encountered a series of challenges that demanded a pivot. Ultimately, we converged all the functionalities into a single script, ensuring smoother communication between the UI and gameplay elements, while simultaneously reducing the complexity of debugging and future updates.

In the realm of optimization, we delved into making Flappy Animals not only visually appealing but also resource-efficient, ensuring it runs smoothly across a wide array of devices. Tweaking aspects like sprite quality, resolution scaling, and physics calculations, we've managed to uphold a consistent and stable performance.

without compromising the game’s aesthetic and responsiveness. Additionally, by compressing audio files and utilizing sprite atlases, we managed to reduce the game’s overall file size, making it more accessible to users with limited device storage.