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.

Audio

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.

Leaderboard

Cleaned this up quite a bit visually. Looks a lot more pleasant with a bit of background movement. Functionally, there are now two tabs: 

1. Top scores.
2. Scores nearby the player. 

Language

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.

Settings

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. 

Level Design

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.

Experimental Work

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. 

Other Tweaks

Changed the font to something "blobbier." I fixed some other small bugs, refactored some things, etc.

Stay tuned for more updates and happy blobbing!