New Interface, and general Bug fixing

I've been doing some general polishing these last few days, and I've come up with some pretty good looking changes. The first big one was redoing the interface at the top of the screen. I had never been super happy with how the old one looked, but up until now had focused mostly on the mechanics of the game. The thing that sparked me to change up the interface was as I got a new laptop (woot), my screen resolution changed. The game got kind of warped and wouldn't all fit anymore, so I started researching screen sized and resolutions and the like.

The basic idea I had was take that solid block of interface and split it into pieces that could be dynamically positioned to fit the screen. I haven't worked with views and screen widths for a while, so it did take a while to get it working. But, the end result seems to work quite well, and it's pretty nice to be able to play the game full screen. Here's the new visual:

I am taking a more stone-feel to the interface anyways, so I like how this all turned out. It just looks a lot more polished and fitting for the game. One thing I had wanted to change in the past too was the symbol in the middle. Up until now, I felt like the spell casting was a little bit too... all-powerful. I have the testing rigged with basically 10x the mana, so that contributes to it. But, I ended up making a cool mechanic as I added the two concerns. I made the element symbol have some simple animation, and since takes time to switch, I made it so the player can't cast spells during the switch. At first it was weird getting used to, but it made it feel more challenging and a little more fair to need a small delay before just cycling through spells like crazy. Here's what the cycle looks like:

It's simple, but it does look pretty cool during the game.

Besides these bigger changes, I've been working on a bit of general bug fixing and polishing. I never was able to document this in a clip, but sometimes the pushback from enemies results in a massive super jump. It was hilarious to watch, but it worried me about what type of exploits that could imply later on. Another bug I found was how a pushable block could fall on top of, or inside of I should say, the player, and cause big problems. If it's just one, the result is just visually odd. If there are two right by each other though, the player can become completely stuck. After looking back at the code I used, I definitely could go back and do a better approach. Since it was late last night and I didn't want to delve into pulling mechanics, I just made the blocks breakable :D It actually turned into a good experience on parent objects, and I just made the object take longer to break. There's been a few other minor changes, but overall I'm just smoothing out some of the bumps for the game. It's getting more and more fun to play though! Quite enjoyable.