Freshly Squeezed Progress Report – Muting, New Menu Music, and Help Pages

In the last sprint report, I got a another level completed, and I put together a plan for the final pieces of work to do before I release v1.0 of Toy Factory Fixer.

I put a decent dent into that plan last week.

Sprint 46: Release criteria

Planned and Complete:

• Allow player to mute SFX and music separately
• Create music for main menus

Planned and Incomplete:

• Create How To Play menu

I easily finished the work I started to create mute/unmute toggle buttons in my first hour of development.

And since the game is fairly silent outside of a game level being played, I added music to the main menu screens. I basically slowed down the in-game music so that it is rhythmic and industrial-sounding. I thought about having a droning factory hum, but I liked the music, and the hum was distracting, so I took it back out.

So the rest of the week was spent working on creating help pages. I know that even if I had done everything I could to make the game as intuitive and as clear as possible, someone would still have questions about it, so having in-game help seemed like a vital thing to have before release.

Of course, it required coming up with what help I wanted to show the player.

I used the same in-game “screen” that I used for the Credits and the end-of-level summary, and since it is so much smaller than the actual game’s screen, it helped me be concise and to the point. I’m still worried I was too verbose, though, and I worry that having too many pages of help text is also overwhelming.

Unfortunately I wasn’t able to finish creating the last few pages before the end of the week, so I will continue that work this week. Then, I’ll update the worker barks so that they are distinct for each worker type before moving on to the rest of the release criteria tasks I identified.

Thanks for reading!

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