Hi Spinners, this is a small update before Christmas just to give you a few new tracks and show you what we've been working on to prepare for 1.0.
UPDATE 19 - THREE NEW TRACKS
While we work on our final features for 1.0 (level up system, unlockables, proper gamepad and console-friendly UI), we have kept up licensing tracks from around the place. We were going to release them all in one bunch at 1.0, but we decided to release some early as a Christmas present.
We're pleased to be able to add the awesome Au5 to our roster with Voidwalkers (co-written with Chime), along with Aussie funk pop band Supathick and their extremely catchy tune "Time". Oh and we slipped in the title track from Teminite's Raise The Black Flag album. Send them to the depths!
1.0 UI Update
We have changed our UI many times since we launched. Initially we wanted something cool and dope, which evolved to cool and dope but slightly functional and finally to cool, dope but a bit all over the place. Turns out if you slowly add features to a UI that wasn't designed for them, things can quickly get complicated.
Our main goal with the UI update was to make it more controller friendly. We want to achieve this by making sure every menu has a simple flow of left to right, with options going up and down only along the selected axis.
In our current UI, it is unclear what is currently highlighted and what is selected (active). We have written some nice clean shaders to highlight both the current selected object, and the selected UI section.
We have created a new UI colouring system which lets us build unique colour palettes (one of our unlockable level up rewards). Check them out below.
The design of the track select menu now contains two distinct panels. The left-most panel can be swapped out for level up / unlock info, leaderboards, or player stats (including the selected level's run history). This should cater to more types of players whether you're chasing medals (clearing all tracks), grinding one chart until you're the best, digging into stats, or looking to unlock everything.
Difficulty is now more clear, and the flow of the menu no longer asks players to choose difficulty every time they play a level (which ends up feeling redundant). The difficulty ring now loops up to level 100!
There are "playlist" icons on the right which let players flip between base game charts, DLCs and customs without leaving and returning to the menu.
The actual level playing state has been refactored so that all options including calibration, accessibility and such are available while playing a level (accessible via pause menu). This means you will now be able to swap settings, track and wheel skins on the fly without having to quit back to menu. Neat!
Keep in mind that there's still a lot of work to be done on this new UI. Icons are missing or placeholder, polish will still be done etc.
One final thing, we are going to be shutting down SpinFM and replacing it with a proper multiplayer system some time in the future, so we will no longer be adding new tracks to the service.
See you next update.