Techno colors – playfield iterations

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As you might have noticed, I’m no real artist, per se.
I’m learning something new everyday and especially the combination of colors is something that I find extremely interesting, yet I fail to grasp how it works, all the time :D

So I was kinda proud that I accidentally stumbled over something that was close to calling it a “theme” for our game.
It features the combination of “real” materials like the wooden border with some more futuristic use of gradients for the title and menus. I enjoy the combination of the retro and futuristic parts of that thought.
However when putting in the green grass and orange floor it kinda looks weird on the iPad, themewise. The blue ground still is my favorite field so far. It just plays nicely with the noble wood border, in terms of the RetroFuture aspect.

So I was thinking and thinking on how I could tie the 2 elements more together and thought “hey, why not play around with the puck and playfield colors a bit”.
One hour later this is where I ended up for now:

First iteration

It featured a set of 5 distinct technorainbow colors that look rather funky next to each other, right ?
I then added a more complex version of a puck instead of the polished/shiny plastic one, so it fits with every single of the 5 playfield variants, which was problematic with the strong red and blue variants that we feature in the current build.

Second thoughts

It looks nice and all, however I felt I should try another version which toyed with the pucks color a bit. Due to all the different colors it was (for me) impossible to find that one color that could be used throughout all of the playfields that didn’t make my eyes jump out of my skull and commit suicide.
So with some cliché multiply/overlay tests I found the nice strong and glowing combination below. I’d really like to test this version as well. It has a much more interesting and eye-catching factor to it, while still staying within the theme. However it might a tad overboard and less subtle – which was my initial idea for the game.

Third time’s the charm

The last iteration is a mixture of both worlds. It features the colored pucks as well but with less sparkle, glow and saturation. I would love to test this version as well, just to see how my eyes trick me into preferring this or that while on the iPad it looks totally different, cooler or less cool.

Personally I looooove the new look since it has a much more interesting, colorful and stylized approach to it. But now all of the menu mockups as well as the game’s logo are slightly questioned again.
Colorwise it’s really nice how the logo is set apart. But since the game doesn’t feature the plastic pucks anymore it seems misplaced to have it on the game title. Still it looks cool in a way, in my opinion.
Argh, what shall we do ?

Happens to me all the time. Circular development is something I’m horribly good at. “Oh I don’t like this aspect, let’s change it….Whoa looks great, but now this and that doesn’t fit.”
I guess the only way out of it is to:

1) Develop all art assets on one weekend and never touch it again
2) Iterate and gather feedback to make best of both worlds

I choose the sandwich !

Procedural rubberband mesh

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I wish I knew more about the technical difficulties we are facing with Bonk-A-Donk but I don’t (yet).
Previously the iconic rubberband we featured in Bonk-A-Donk was only a thin line that served as a placeholder for the actual rubberband mesh we wanted to have in there.
Since we have the roundest thing one can imagine, a circular puck, this seemed to serve as quite a challenge to Lukas to get it up to his own standards.
While the first video shows the basic subdivision process that can be toggled within the unity3d inspector views…..

…the second video pretty much shows how spectacular it works in the actual game.
You can drag the puck around and the rubberband gently wraps around it, behaving like I would have never imagined it to be possible !

Kudos to Lukas for making that possible. Man, I’m impressed :)

Betatest outcome so far

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Alright, I thought it could be interesting to talk a bit about the past few days.
As you might have registered we searched for betatesters on Unity3d and Toucharcade forums as well as via twitter.
We were explicitly looking for people who were using Testflight.

After a good week, we were lucky enough to gather a testgroup of 15 people. I wrote a polite email back to each of these persons and asked about how they got to know about the betatest and a tiny bit of background information about themselves (developer, gamer,…)
It was my first real endeavour considering the testing business so therefore I wanted to find out the most promising way of gathering a helpful crowd of people.

Unfortunately some of them didn’t have an iPad, so they couldn’t really get a chance to test the game, at all and we were down to 13 eligible testers for Bonk-A-Donk.
Out of these bulk it seems only a handful bothered to even install the game. And one person was kind enough to send us a feedback email about the build.
Sadly the feedback listed all of the things that Lukas had pointed out in the release email that weren’t ready, polished or known bugs, as of now.

So both of us got a good amount of paranoia about what we did wrong :D
Here’s the data we gathered from our first semi-public betatest of Bonk-A-Donk:

Next up:
The evolution of the rubberband !