The past 2 weeks has been spent productively. I've been working on the art, reward system and animations for a more complete gameplay experience.

Working both with real tactile art and digital is such a creative and interesting process. The time spent in the digital gets smoothed away by some satisfying watercolour painting. Such a balanced process. 

This also has its challenges though. Since the assets are hand-painted, I'll have to work on enhancing them well in the digital space so that they look alive and not just a cut-out figure. I noticed this the most with the character. 

Some glimpses of the new assets:

And a quick gameplay video with new animations on the bumpers and character getting the life ball.

As you can see the bumpers are now replaced with a fungi type art and they do a bouncing animation on hit.  To reach this I used the DOTween tweening engine. When the ball hits a bumper, it plays a punch-move animation on itself. It simulates the spring effect on the bumper. (The animation is played on the visual side only, so it doesn't affect the collider.)

Mushin (the character) also got a new animation when the life ball hits him, the particles fade into his belly. This allows for Mushin to be larger in size - this was a big tick as him being so tiny was visually not very pleasing and also felt a bit off.  Now, his tummy can absorb energy from the life ball (well, it doesn't sound as nice as it looks...).

The collectables (intending to be sun globes) also got a new colour. At this stage, I'm not sure if a watercolour look would be better or if I should just leave them as they are or a glowing yellow globe similar to their current look. 

Talking about the reward system. One of the goals for this time was to come up with and re-structure the reward system, so that it feeds more into the game and the story.  So far, you'd just collect glowing balls (purple) for points displayed on the top of the screen, which doesn't really give any motivation or feedback to the players, neither makes much of a sense of what a glowing ball really is. It was a placeholder for my prototype, but it was time to move on.

The game will have an internal point system allowing players to set new records for themselves. Each level has a set amount of rewards that are compulsory to collect to be able to win the game. Until they're not collected, players cannot hit Mushin with the ball and win the level. There are bonus rewards (bigger sun globes) that are worth double points and players can win the game without collecting these. However, they'll score less. 
The sun stands for bringing back the light & sunshine to the environment. As we progress the backgrounds get less and less grey, introducing green and sunshine more and more into the scenery. 

My next tasks involve testing and creating a new functionality for the bumpers - implementing their functionality into the visuals more without losing clarity and gameplay logic. I am also working on implementing the option to continue to play where players left off. As well as enabling post processing tool to work properly - so that background elements blur and other effects can be changed dinamically.

Thank you for reading & to be continued...