Posted July 24, 2023 by Snarfum Industries
We are so excited to see leaderboard scores arriving after launching the game! It felt great to know that people out there were playing the game. Very rewarding.
I found a bit of time over the weekend and addressed a few quality-of-life items and issues that I discovered after launching the game. Jonas also managed to do some audio polishing and additions.
Jonas punched up the audio by adding a starting sound and tuning the existing sounds. There are a few missing items for audio, like the start screen audio. But I'm so smitten by how darn cute the sounds are.
Cleaned this up quite a bit visually. Looks a lot more pleasant with a bit of background movement. Functionally, there are now two tabs:
Generally, I don't like censorship. Some of the leaderboard names, as I suspected might happen, included some form of obscenity. I didn't have a plan to prevent this.
However, I realized that my niece is just at the age where she might be able to play this game, and I didn't want to subject her to some of the rough flavors of the internet and human language. I wanted her to enjoy it without the risk of confronting difficult topics. And spare me the uncomfortable task of explaining what a "Cleveland steamer" is.
So I implemented a bad word filter for the leaderboard and created a Settings page to host the option. It's off by default. So I'm not censoring you, you're censoring you. If you want.
I found a list of obscene words (in several languages) on a public Github project. It was mildly entertaining scrolling through it, lots of stuff I've never heard about.
I created a settings page to hold the new "Kid-Friendly Leaderboard" option. I also added audio sliders for Music, Effects, Ambience, and UI. I added a similar scrolling background art that I had Dall-E help me produce.
I always sort of intended the perimeter of the playable area to be represented by a cartoonish fog. Something really solid and blobby. I haven't implemented what I'm envisioning yet, so I tossed in a fence and some vertical fog to enhance things slightly.
I suspect it'll be some form of a Unity shader graph that displaces the vertices using a scrolling noise texture.
I'd like to have additional maps (aiming for 3) to build out the variety of the game a bit. I was beginning the work and thought I'd share an early draft of a new level. Not 100% sure if it'll make it into the game as I'm not really sure how strange the environment should be. The current draft feels a bit "bland" thematically.
Changed the font to something "blobbier." I fixed some other small bugs, refactored some things, etc.
Stay tuned for more updates and happy blobbing!