Developer Diary 25 - The buying Experience, Part 2

I didn’t have much time to spend on the game last week, since I had to do a lot of IRL stuff; so this will be a short devlog!

I continued fleshing out the buying system by implementing the correct menus and thinking how they should be organized. Right now things are a bit chaotic as I try to marry usability with functionality. To be honest, it’s posing a very difficult challenge to try and code these menus. Currently I am not happy with how it looks, but I am prioritizing functionality for now and will rethink how the user experience will be later on. It’s given me quite the headache so far, but hopefully I will figure things out soon.

With this new system, it will deduct money from your balance, internally save your current hair so it goes back to what you had if you are unhappy with your selection (cycling through the options and then pressing back), remove energy and finally put you in what I call the “idle state”, which just shows you your character with the UI in the closed position.

There is a lot of work to be done on these systems to make them great. Right now everything is very rough around the edges and feels pretty stiff. Adding little effects and animations will improve a lot of this stuff down the line, but for now I need to focus on mechanically making it work. Which means sadly, it’s not so pretty.

I am considering releasing a small build which only includes a few locations but shows off the ‘earning/spending’ loop of the game. I’m not sure how I feel about it just yet, but it’s in my mind.

Hopefully I will this part of the game done this week and can start focusing on other things more.

Thank you for reading and for all the continued support!

~Albatross