First thing I wanted to work on was changing the level ups to be consistent. To begin, the game would randomly choose an “unlock ability” or “bonus XP challenge” upon level up. However, this could become frustrating for players who were “unlucky” and not offered a new mathematical operator after 8 or more level ups. So for consistency and to try avoid people getting frustrated, it was decided that you will always unlock abilities then the bonus XP challenges would only start once all functions were unlocked. An alternative thought was to consider “let the player choose between which upgrade”, but then in an attempt to keep the game simple - I decided against this.

The levelling up process also had some issues. If you levelled up multiple times in one large-scoring match, you would only be offered one award for levelling up. To fix this, I effectively created a queue, where level ups wait if there is already a level up. The Xp etc would still instantly be earned, but the level up rewards would wait until the previous was claimed / completed before allowing the next.

Next up, visuals. The game needed some more visual clues to help players follow the flow of the game and be aware of the current mathematical function selected. First off was drawing attention to the unlocked functions if you earn them. To do this, the padlocks were animated and a highlighted border was added to the mathematical function bar at the bottom of the screen, The “jingling” animation of the padlocks certainly draws attention now and is hard to ignore.

To help making the player more aware of their selected function, I decided that the different operators needed different colours. This would allow for an association to be developed with the colour. The colour would show on the button, also on the equation bar (a UI feature added to show the current math equation you’re building up this turn), and I also added it to the tiles you select to make a move. When you press on a tile it colours the border the “functions colour”, and as you drag over other tiles to choose the other part of the equation, it highlights the tiles in the math functions colour too. This will hopefully have some effect on people realising they are in the “wrong” function unintentionally.

Some changes also came in the shape of sorting order of tiles etc as they got moved or affected by various animations. As the text on the tiles is actually a 3D object, it made changing the sorting layer less easy to do - but it was possible through creating some scripts to push things to different layers.

More to come in the next post.