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 !

…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

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
Here’s the data we gathered from our first semi-public betatest of Bonk-A-Donk:

Next up:
The evolution of the rubberband !

If you’re interested, let us know. We’re starting this weekend !
You just need an iPad registerd on Testflight and you’re as good to go as everyone else on our little precious project:
Go go, go TestFlight, go !

Along with some pretty exciting news following an idea of Lukas. He’s such a mastermind, I can tell

More information:
http://unityusergroup.nl/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/79812614@N07/sets/72157629999586200
https://twitter.com/#!/UnityUsergroup

Our game is even featured in one of the photoooos !!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/79812614@N07/7315162528/in/set-72157629999586200

Well if it wasn’t enough to see some proudbursting photos of your baby sitting nudeytudey on the table Lukas was also awesome enough to capture a handful of videos taken from there which show the game in action

Maaaaan, I’m sooo excited. And honored and proud to have my Lukas
Hope you enjoy it at least 1/10 as much as we do !

He promised to take the latest build with him, so I’m nervous, interested, excited to see what feedback he can gather there.

I got the latest build also and I have to say, boy it’s fun to remember the various builds we went through up to that really solid thing we have right now. The pucks behave tons time better than in the initial build. The rubberband works pretty well and I actually played it against my first human opponent. Mum won

I did some quite neat 3d/2d hybrid trick that now gives us the exact look that I wished for, technically. The layering is a bit off, but I’m quite buffled that it worked out just like I imagined it. Thinking ahead actually helped – haha – almost too smooth

I’ll be writing it all up on the weekend to feature some more insight blogpost, for once !
Also I’m dying to try out the weird video recording technique that I found online. Includes, paper, chairs, holes, hands, devices…

Stay tuned !

Rubber – bouncy bouncy

Most exciting news was the addition of the rubberband. It’s the key game element, adding some twist and having this working exactly as I imagined it, was like being citizen of Chocolateverse*.

Build thoughts

What kinda worries me atm, is that the device doesn’t register quicker touches/swipes, as well as multiple “persons” playing it.
The icon is not thaaaat bad, either – haha
The stuff that initiall caught my eye is the blurry blue ground texture. Don’t know where that comes from.

Also I don’t like the border being made of several pieces of wood. I wasn’t sure how it’d look like but I think having a consistent border with one piece of wood, will look much better.
This is something that I should be able to correct on my side with changing the texture and the mesh accordingly.

The next steps

After seeing the new build I felt like tackling one of these bloody menus, so I present a reworked leaderboard (using the style of the game’s name, at the moment)

*Note that the term Chocolateverse is creation of Daniele Giardini

There were some points that I didn’t agree too, but I failed to send the comprehensive email, until now, since I managed to screw up the file units on the exported meshes of the playfield, over and over again. D’oh !