For this week, my goal was to polish the game screen and implement a combo mechanic we came up with. I started by changing how “Flex Dance” was drawn on the screen. Before, it was an individual image, but now, I have added it onto the original background since it is static. Now the background image is a starry sky and the Flex Dance banner. This was more faithful to our screen mock-ups and can be seem on the screenshots later on the post.
Next, I implemented the combo mechanic. The game has a score multiplier which increases with the more arrows a player hits consecutively. For every ten arrows, the multiplier increases by 1, up to a maximum of 6 (we chose 6 because it is the number used by some other rhythm games). When a player scores an arrow correctly, they receive a number of points multiplied by the combo multiplier. The combo is tracked by a circular progress meter on the top right:
The color of the meter changes depending on the current value of the multiplier. In the example above, the arc is red for a multiplier of 1, but after scoring a few more arrows correctly, the meter fills up, the multiplier increases to 2, and the meter resets, now appearing blue.
I also made some small quality of life changes. The text font size now adapts according to the display size, the song icon was shifted up a bit, and pressing the ESC key will close the game.
I am somewhat behind schedule now unfortunately. I was supposed to have finished the game screen by this week. It is almost complete, but it is missing the linear scale scoring, the pop-text saying “Great”, “Perfect”, “Miss”, etc., the the fonts are not the final ones, and the arrows look stretched. The final game also does not have a lives mechanic, it just accumulates scores until the song ends.
For next week, I intend to finalize the game screen, making the change stated above, and start to work on the high score screen as well.