Probably wouldn't be a bad idea to have the checkpoint itself indicate somehow that it can be interacted with again once you pick up another chip, though. If it's doing that now, it's subtle enough that I missed it.
I forgot to address this before. It's a good idea, probably the easiest thing would be to have the pinwheel stop spinning if the checkpoint can be re-triggered, and it'll go back to spinning when Leilani touches it. I've made a note, thanks!
My only concern is that, if each of those punches corresponds to a button press, some players will be confused and think something went wrong when the game doesn't start up after their first attempt. I'd recommend making it all one animation of the Leilani fist punching the new file block over and over until it finally shatters and the game starts up.
That's a fair concern, but I do like the playfulness and interactivity involved in pressing the button multiple times. I'll keep it in mind and see if I get any comments about it in future playtesting. Once I add audio for the cracking and breaking that'll also hopefully ensure the player is aware of what's happening.
EDIT: if you want to go nuts with easter eggs, hold A to charge up a more powerful punch?
Although I guess that does not fit the in-game mechanics
I think that may be a step too far for this one
it would probably start to get in the way of the general usability of the UI. Maybe instead I can put more easter eggs and little fun features into other parts of the UI
Latest progressA quick update this week as I didn't get a huge amount done.
Scrolling MenusA couple of the menus have now got big enough to require scrolling. I was trying for a while to fit each each menu on a single screen, to avoid implementing scrolling, but it became impractical as I was having to unnecessarily nest options within subscreens which was just a pain to navigate. Now the menu scrolls instead which is much simpler to use:
Challenge Description popupThe popup that describes each challenge level has had a little layout tweak. It was feeling quite cramped - the thumbnail image was too small to show much, and if the description text went onto two lines it didn't really fit any more.
The new version has a bigger thumbnail with the description overlaid, which I think looks nicer, and also allows much more room for descriptions.
(Obviously putting a non-placeholder thumbnail also helps it look better!)
The line width which is used for wrapping the description text is now dynamically selected within a range. The system aims to balance out the length of the lines, so if the description is split over two lines, then those two lines will be of roughly equal width. This fixes the example above where "can!" was given a whole line on its own.
That's about it for the week. I've begun working on the rainy mountain level again, which I previously stopped to do all the UI polish. Hoping to get it finished this week!
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