Bliz Studio - 1 minute update - July 26 (2019)

1 Minute Update: Devlog July 26, 2019 The game is coming along great. I have a points/score system in the game. For every level you complete you’ll receive points. For every level you complete with a minimum amount of moves, then you’ll get a BONUS!. There are still tons of things to do. I’m

A one minute development update from July 2019 covering two things: the scoring system is now working, and the main menu is about to be restructured. The second item is the more interesting one, because it's a change made purely for how the game feels to start.

Scoring is in

The scoring system is functional. Every time a player finishes a level they get points, and that base award is now flowing through correctly.

On top of that there's a bonus tier: finishing a level within a minimum number of moves awards additional points. That's a deliberate design choice worth pausing on. Rewarding efficiency rather than just completion gives a puzzle game a second layer of goals, so a player who has already solved a level still has a reason to replay it.

Presentation is the next job

Scoring working and scoring looking good are separate problems. Right now the score display is just a template animation standing in for the real thing.

The next pass is on how the score reads on screen for the player. That's filed as polish, and it is, but a score you can't see clearly is close to a score that doesn't exist. Points landing with weight, at a readable size, timed to the end of a level, is what makes the bonus system feel worth chasing.

Cutting the main menu out of the path to play

The bigger change is structural. The main menu currently lives in a completely separate scene from the game. The plan is to move it into the game scenes instead.

The effect is that as soon as you hit the play button, you are instantly playing. No scene load, no transition, no waiting. The goal is a faster, more rapid path into the game and a more satisfying start for the player.

Why this matters more than it sounds

Scene loading between menu and gameplay is one of the most common sources of dead time in a mobile game, and it lands at the worst possible moment. The player has just decided to play. Anything between that decision and the game starting is friction.

Keeping the menu inside the game scene means the assets are already loaded, so hitting play becomes a UI state change rather than a scene transition. On mobile hardware that's the difference between a couple of seconds and none.

It's also the kind of change that's much cheaper to make in 2019-style early development than after the menu has grown its own dependencies. If your own project has a separate menu scene and a noticeable pause on play, this is worth testing early rather than filing under polish.