Bliz Studio - 1 minute update - August 1 (2019)

1 Minute Update: Devlog August 1, 2019 The game is progressing quickly. I have a lot of bugs fixed (and of course more pop up) but starting to spend more time on “polish” (how the game looks an feels). Stay tuned for more!! - - - - - - - - - - - - For my current game Trixel Rocket, you can dow

A one minute update from August 2019 covering a batch of changes that landed together. It's a good snapshot of the point in a project where the systems are working and the work shifts toward making them feel good.

The UI got reworked

The UI has been changed, and it's the first item mentioned because it's the layer everything else in this update surfaces through. New systems are only visible to a player if the interface shows them.

That connection matters: every other change in this list needed somewhere on screen to live, which is usually why UI passes and feature passes end up happening at the same time.

Points and bonus actions

Points are now going into the game after each level. On top of the base award, there are bonus actions that trigger if you complete a level within a minimum number of moves.

This is the efficiency incentive that gives a puzzle game replay value. Finishing a level is the first goal, finishing it cleanly is the second, and having both means a solved level still has something left to offer.

Progress that persists

There's now permanence to the number of levels you've completed, so you can always see where you are.

Persistent progress sounds like a small feature and behaves like a large one. A player who closes the app and comes back to a visible record of what they've finished has a reason to continue. A player who comes back to a blank slate frequently doesn't come back a third time.

The jelly cube and new animations

There are lots of changes to the jelly cube itself, the character at the center of the game, along with a batch of extra animations throughout.

The standout is a new animation that plays on every level after you complete it, tracing out the path the character took through the level. That's a genuinely smart piece of feedback design. It rewards the completion, it shows the player their own solution, and on levels with a minimum-move bonus it quietly teaches them how efficient their route actually was. One animation doing three jobs.

Where the project is heading

The closing note is that there's a lot more to come, and that most of the upcoming changes are going to be polish elements.

That's a meaningful signal about project phase. When the update list turns from systems to polish, the game has stopped being built and started being finished. The mechanics are in, the progression works, and what's left is the layer that decides whether players enjoy any of it.