Hi everyone! With this devlog the development of this project is done for now. Go have a play at the new version of the game! When next year comes around, if I have the oppotunity I would definitely keep working on it toward publishing this on appstores and deploying to iOS platform, and more balanced and exciting gameplay loop. But for my purpose of a gift for my mum, this is the best I can do with given time.

For the past couple of week since after the previous devlog, I've been focusing on finishing the vision of the game with proper visual assets, sound, music and some gameplay balancing. I'm so happy how this project turned out with the visual style as I've mentioned previously that I usually perfer minimalistic design. 

---- Visual Assets ----

The title screen and gameplay scene are the 2 main screen that I've focused on. The title screen is mostly a more detailed and carefully drawn version of the mockup I did at the start. I added dropshadow to help adding more depth to the different sections to help separating the sections and making it visually more interesting. The language buttons are fitted into the bottom corners because it happens that I have 2 localisation options and I can fit them in there. On the gameplay scene, the main interactable part of the UI is the action bar so it's decorated with heavy patterns with red and yellow colour palette to keep up with the visual language of other buttons. 

The buttons all have patterns decorating them. At first I was going to make some generic patterns, but that would be a missed oppotunity. I tried to add in motifs to the pattern designs, like hammers and pickaxes for building, cogs for setting and the return icon for, of course, returning. The drag bar have arrows hinting at the direction player need to drag it to.

Other screens are all presented in this popup style with the frame reused from the title screen. These popups have dropshadows too to help with pushing them to the front. From some of these smaller elements like sliders you can see how I've reused assets from other areas to help with the design.

---- Sound and Music ----

I have to say that sound design is really not my speciality. The most I can do it have a broad direction of what I want the game to sound like and do some basic editing with free sound assets. I have this list written down in my production document for all the sound I have in this game. They mostly emphasis key interactions and how the game is responding to player input.

For music I have got some help from a very kind friend Flearoy. I've sent him some eastern European folk music and synth music for inspiration and he made a nice piece of music for my game. Because of the nature of the game, the music would be played for many times when playing, but also I can't add in many variations because of web build file size limit. I ended up using a version with extra main instrument for a stronger first impression. For a bigger game with proper audio production I would probably want to learn FMOD implementation for a smaller file size and add in more varients, but for now, I would have to sacrifice this.

---- Gameplay ----

I don't have time to add in more mechanics, which the game needs if I want to push it further. So I played the game many times and balanced out the numbers for various mechanics so the game lasts for a decent while (not for as long as I hoped it would be but this is the best I can do with what I have), and player need to play smart and utilise the buildings to be able to win the game.

I also had a couple friends doing last minute testing for the game. All of them reported that the drag bar is hard to understand. So I added a tutorial screen at the start of the game to explain how it works, while also leading attention to a couple other important UI elements.

Thank you all for reading my dev logs. It has been a very interesting experience developing and making these logs. I'll be out for rest of this year, and hopefully I'll come back with something new next year.