UI, Now More Papery and a Shiny Object

Those UI updates for Lines: the prototype I mentioned in the last one actually happened!

UI updates

As I've been playing the game more, I noticed that it wasn't clear what things were doing. How upgrades were applied or even where they were applied. And that the dark theme didn't quite fit with the vibe of the game. And with this latest iteration there are still issues that I want to resolve, but it's a big improvement over where things were.

To solve those things, I moved the upgrades from the Shop tab to existing on the Building itself. You still need to unlock the upgrades and new buildings from the Shop though. This should help the player (and me) understand what upgrades are associated with what building.

For the vibe, I chose to go down the path of feeling more "hand drawn". And to achieve that there's really only two colors, black to mimic a pen or pencil, and the parchment color to look more like paper. And to keep going down the papery, hand drawn path, maybe I could do paper-like sounds when clicking the buttons, more shadow effects, some cool animations... but that's for another day 😁

A shiny object

And there was a hackathon at the co-working space that I use. A vibe coding hackathon. Now I'm pretty neutral on AI, but I'm not blind to the fact that it is everywhere. So I used this hackathon to actually try vibe coding. My teammate and I made Bug Reaver! Is it great? No. Is it fun? Maybe? It IS impressive that we were able to prototype this from 0 to playable prototype in about 4 hours. And we truly did vibe code it.

We did the following:

• Come up with a simple game design doc (GDD) in Google Docs
• Feed that game design doc into ChatGPT and get it to refine things and spec more of the design out
• Then take the updated GDD and put it in a markdown file in the project directory
• Use Claude Code to read the GDD and then generate the project

And it was playable almost immediately!

From there it was iterations of: play the game, find a bug or a tweak, ask Claude Code to change it. And I truly didn't look at the code the whole time. Which was super weird for me because I like knowing what the code is doing.

From here, I'm going to table Bug Reaver and not let it distract me from Lines: the prototype. And for Lines..... looottts of tuning is in my future. The plan is to play the game a bunch and then tweak costs of things for the game to feel like it has some type of progression.