Mind Over Magnet Devlog - December 13 (Patreon)

Hey Patrons! I’m back with another devlog.

So you hopefully caught the last episode of Developing. A quick catchup: I had made a rough draft of the entire game. And now I’m going through it, world by world, and polishing everything up to completion.

In the video I showed what I did for world 1: level design, art pass, sound effects, UI, and meta-level systems like progression saving and a hint system.

After all of that, I had a finished demo for world one.

Or… so I thought! I gave that demo to all of you here on Patreon, plus a few extra playtesters and experts. And I ended up with an almighty list of things to fix, rethink, and redesign!

For each piece of feedback I considered whether or not it was something I wanted to change. If it was, I added it to an ever-growing Trello board with lists for things like bugs, UI problems, sound issues, graphical changes, and problems with individual levels.

And so since then I’ve just been slowly picking things off that list! Lemme talk about some significant ones.

Vector everything!

Okay, so one complaint I had about the game was that the text and UI looked a little… squiffy. Everything (except the logo) was done in pixel art which is consistent with the actual game… but does look a little gross at times.

I decided to experiment with changing the text from sharp pixel art to a smooth vector font and… it immediately looked a lot better. Plus, it’s much better for accessibility.

The only problem is… I now have vector text on pixel art buttons and speech bubbles. Doesn’t look great!

So I made the mad decision to re-do the entire UI. Instead of 720p-sized pixel art, I redid it all as 4K-sized vector art. That includes every button on the options menu, the speech bubbles for cutscenes, and even all the button icons.

It was a lot of work, but I think it was a great decision. It still looks consistent (games like Celeste have long showed it’s fine to mix pixel art and vector art) but it just looks overall a thousand times more polished and professional.

Follow me!

A common complaint was that as soon as you met Magnus, you’d place him on a green button and leave the level without him. It felt odd. Magnus actually does follow you into the pipe, but it happens in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment.

To change this I moved the button closer to the exit. Now you’ll definitely see Magnus come with you into the pipe. I also changed the dialogue so he says he’ll follow you.

That’s not the only level that needed some work. I replaced a level entirely. I took out the finale of the sewer - that needs a more significant redesign. And I’ve changed the order of things. I’ll be running some playtests with these new levels soon.

Field ghosts

When an electromagnetic beam is on, you see a bold blue light, giant moving arrows, and particles flying up. When it’s off… there’s nothing. That can make it challenging to know where the beam will be when you turn it back on.

I fixed this by adding “ghosts” of the field. Now when the magnetic field is off, there’s a very subtle remnant of the beam. That should hopefully show players where the beam will be when it comes back on.

Mouse in the house

I’m not going to bore you with the details of this one, but let’s just say I spent way too long making the UI work seamlessly on both mouse and controller - even if you jump back and forth between them.

A word of advice: if your game is primarily/exclusively played with the controller / keyboard… just force the player to also interact with the menus using that scheme. Forget the mouse! Save yourself a thousand headaches!

The rest

Plus lots of other little changes like…

You now have to hold the button down for longer to reset the level.

Level names now show up when you start a stage.

The jump sound effect has a random pitch change every time you jump.

There’s a progress saving indicator (which I made as pixel art... and then immediately had to redo in vector!)

And lots of little bugs and annoyances. I’m still not done! The Trello board is still creaking under the weight of cards (new ones get added with every playtest). But it’s getting there.

And this will all pay off in the future! By polishing world one to a perfect(?) sheen, It will make creating worlds two through five a lot, lot easier. And it’s better to do all this stuff now while I’m still excited, rather than at the very end when I will inevitably want to die.

You can play the updated demo now, over on Itch.

Speak soon! About non-magnet things! 

Mark