Meanwhile, back at the ranch (Loc Part 9)

While all the level work was being done we were continuing to push forward in all directions. One of the biggest challenges for us to overcome was UI and Menu design. Matt was in charge of creating the functionality for nearly menu in the game, which was a colossal task, especially since we scrapped and recreated our UI mid way through development. The image to the right was how our original section select screen was arrayed.

And to be frank, it was a terrible cluttered mess. Through testing we discovered how bad it really was, so early on we sat down and began a massive redesign. One of the most important things you have to do as a developer is look at how other games do things. We turned to Cut the rope and Angry Birds, two extraordinarily successful iOS games, for inspiration.

From those two games we drafted a new design which underwent one more minor change before the final version. Here is the evolution of the art for the section select screen.

And the Main Menu:

One of the major additions we wanted to include to show that Loc was a polished and industry level game was achievements. We were all fans of getting in-game steam achievements and wanted to create the same kind of experience in our game. Mike headed up this project and six months later Loc shipped with a total of 18 unique and interesting achievements.

The cube itself underwent a total of 6 changes over the course of development. Originally we had these uneven very rough sides. While this proved to be visually interesting, it proved to be a problem while moving tiles. The tiles themselves would clip into and sometimes disappear into the cube. We tried again and again to address the problem, but ultimately we just made a perfectly flat cube and leaned on the normals to make the texture more interesting.