Hello everyone and happy new year! I hope you enjoyed the festivities with your family and friends!

It’s that time again, and once again this update is pretty massive!
It also should be one of the lasts, as the game is nearing completion!

Screens

This update introduces a menu interface by switching between different screens.

Startup screen

The startup screen is still the same, with some light changes:

• using other fonts that the default one
• blinking “Boost to start” between tanks
• moving arrows for mode switching, greyed out arrow indicating unlockable modes
• downward arrow indicating other screens

Screen switching

I implemented dynamic screen switching: screens continue updating while switching and retain their state while invisible.
Switching can be canceled mid-animation.

Options

The first new screen is an options menu with 3 options (for the moment):

• inverted crank (thanks to @jesteraveragejoe for the suggestion)
• chill mode that disables speed lines, screenshakes and impact frames (in addition to honoring the “Reduce flashing” accessibility option. Thanks to @xenwow for the suggestion)
• swapped A and B buttons

When switched, that last option is reflected on the startup screen

Leaderboards

The second added screen, which is empty right now, is the leaderboards screen that will display global leaderboards once the game is (hopefully) released on Catalog and I can create official scoreboards.
Only leaderboards for unlocked modes are displayed.

Achievements

The next screen is major part of this update and it shows achievements!
Thanks to the Playdate Squad team for developing the pd-achievements framework!

The game now has achievements and displays toasts when achievements are granted.
After tweaking and torturing the official viewer to work with my screen switching mechanic, I finally decided to go my own route and developed my own (simplified) viewer which integrates better with the functionning and style of the next screens.

This viewer shows an outlined title over a gradient fade out for scrolling items, a scroll bar, has accelerated scrolling with the crank and elastic overshoot when scrolling past the start or the end of the list.
The achievements are shown in the order of the most recent achievement granted, with date and time displayed.

I’m using achievements as conditions to unlock game modes and features, and am dynamically changing some achievements secret status so that achievements themselves can be “unlocked”. For example, achievements unlocking game modes are secret, as well as the achievements within each game mode, but once a mode is unlocked the corresponding achievements are no longer secret.

Hints

The other major part of this update is an adaptive hint system to help players in mastering the game through recurring gameplay.

I’ve added some more animation to the game over screen and now show a (not so) random hint.
Hints are chosen from a pool of hints, from very basic hints to advanced gameplay techniques, trying to match the player’s experience or difficulties through the granted (or not yet granted) achievements.
Hints are rotated so that you never see the same tip two times in a row.

While we’re talking about the game over screen, I’ve added a smooth transition from this screen to the startup screen for a seamless gameplay experience.

After the player has seen their first hint, the next screen is unlocked, which shows all the already seen hints for review. The hints are shown in increasing order of times seen (so that seldom seen hints are shown first).
This screen uses the same UI grammar as the previous screen, with scroll fading, a scrollbar, accelerated scrolling and elastic overshoot.

Credits

The last screen is the credits, for which I enjoyed drawing little icons (and even new font glyphs) corresponding to the different sections :-)

Back to the top

Even though the arrow at the bottom of the screen is no longer shown while the game is running to prevent unnecessary clutter, all the screens can still be reached while the game is playing.

However, in this case a quick timer is now displayed before resuming gameplay to give you a second before diving back into the action.

This timer is also displayed when exiting from the Playdate menu, as well as when unlocking the device.

This timer does not get triggered if the screen switching is canceled though.

Gameplay

Some minor modifications to the gameplay:

• blimps can spawn over a wider range of altitudes
• I added enemies to the blimps mode after the first day to make it even more challenging :-)
• although the deflecting bullets mechanic is “realistic” and relies on the player’s skill, I added a little “sword assist” that corrects the returning angle if it was already within ±10° of the direction of the enemy firing that bullet.

This gave me the idea of a new bonus, the swordmaster!

• Level one grows your sword by 150%.
• Level two adds some more sword assist to that.
• Level three returns every bullet to their rightful owner regardless of how you hit them!

Miscellaneous

I’ve fixed the “vector font” for digits to have rounded ends, and am not using the default font for the rest of the text anymore.
I’ve added outlined versions of that font to make the text more legible on noisy backgrounds

I made the crank-to-rewind mechanic smoother.