Final fixes and improvements for Prismic Shift in GM8.1
Over the course of last week, I have worked a little more on Prismic Shift ver. GM8.1 FINAL, for the most part adding and changing some things about the game to make it more accessible to bypassing guests in public venues such as art galleries and mini gaming conventions such as Rockage. The changes are as follows, almost all of them suggested by one person from my school's game dev club:
Skippable "disclaimer" text and the ability to start a game during the logo sequence. I'm not entirely sure why I never did the latter from the get go, but since this is a game that's probably not going to be on for a good amount of time (it's a part of several other games in a cabinet, after all), there's no point in having a disclaimer sequence that's unskippable. Plus, it makes it easier for a random person to just jump in the game right away once they start it up.
Confirming a single player game with only one touch of a button compared to mashing buttons to roll down a timer. From observation, most people would get confused when the game says "please advance the timer with the buttons," not realizing that the button presses only advance the timer by 1, and the timer is not as noticeable since it's tucked in at the top-right corner. To fix this, I've made it so that only one button press from any of the three buttons (and the start button) is necessary to confirm a single player game. This also makes it easier for someone to just jump into a single player game.
Changing confirmation text to something less "Japanese." Before, the text for each of the game modes' confirmations were "SINGLE PLAY OK," "CO-OP PLAY OK," and "CO-OP PLAY NG." The latter case, as the one person stated, has the potential to confusing players. Understandable, since NG is sort of a Japanese mannerism that means "no good," or, in this context, "not available," so the confirmations were changed to make more sense in not-Japanese English: "SINGLE PLAY CONFIRMED," "CO-OP PLAY CONFIRMED," and "NO CO-OP PLAY," respectively. Hopefully, these changes won't confuse future players.
Color-coded score separators. Another suggestion from the same person was to add commas into the score to make them easier to read. Instead of commas, however, I opted to color code the millions and billions section of the score. As expected, it makes the scores a bit easier to read, since one's now able to see the millions and billions sections more clearly.
Highlighting your high score on the high score page after a run. A new feature recommended by that same person, instead of running through all of the pages of that mode's high score list, the game will now focus on the player's post-game high score on the list instead. Even though rank and score is already displayed on the name entry screen itself, it gives a better confirmation of where the score is at in context of other scores in the leaderboard.
And that, for the most part, is all of the more recent changes on Prismic Shift ver. GM8.1 FINAL. Since this is, as said in the version, the final GM8.1 version of the game, I'll probably be using this version and creating a sort of consumer version for use on home computers. Hopefully, I can get that version finished before Fanime, because one of the guys that hosts the PC section might consider having some of the game dev club games on the PCs they'll be using. Neato :3
