Hello my Blossom Bitches <3 Today I'll go into a bit of detail about the workflow since the Container Revamp. I spent a lot of time ruminating about our next steps, for all intents and purposes an extremely rough vertical slice of the game was just about coming together - the next step was going to be looking at a sweep at making the User Interface (or UI for nerds) a little more prettier. I don't think it's a stretch to call the current appearance of the game 'goshing hecking awful'. The priority to work on this is kind of shamelessly about promotion and gaining more traction on social media, whenever posting anything about the game it looks so shoddily put together (the Art aside!) it probably turns people away rather than bringing them in.
With that in mind I weighed up this and thought hard about which games needed a facelift, and the Creator Minigame was definitely the first one that sprung to mind. It's really the core of Hush Blossom and what makes it different from any other game out there, so it's important that this not only be right, but be awesome. -- Preamble over, this development cycle I've been working on the hard numbers of the Creator Minigames, and really thinking deeply about how best to display them, how best for the player to play them, and how to implement difficulty but also accessibility.
The latest work has seen an early version of the Stitching Minigame, this aims to create a flier/bullet hell/rhythm game into something that resembles what stitching is (kind of) like in real life. This system requires a lot of work to get a base version of that A) works and B) makes sense and even C) has a natural progression. My design philosophy is not to limit players beyond what they are capable of, which also makes this quite a bit more difficult - and time consuming! -- The minigames we had in place were certainly serviceable, but had no real design plan for progression and were just put together more as experiments. These new systems, such as a Beautiful Katamari esque colour collecting minigame which requires the player to magically collect enough colour particles in the air to dye clothes or defeat shortform top-down dungeons to unlock magical enchantments, fit the world and aesthetic a lot more than arbitrary minigame ideas!
There's not too much to show for this Dev Diary, unless sheets and sheets of numbers peak your interest, but I do have a GIF at the bottom of the latest version of the Stitching Path Alpha, complete with some crazy stitching action!
Expect some more Designer Minigame Alphas next time, until then keep on Blossoming!
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