Riri Rhythm Evolution (part 2)

For this week's Riri Rhythm devlog, I'd like to share how I've been iterating on the game menus and visual apperance of the game.

At first I placed simple black text over white background buttons, as they were easy to view over the dark background and at this stage of the development I was not focusing on looks, just general UI elements layout and functionality.

The main focus at this stage was making sure every button and piece of information that was needed was on the screen and that it was possible to navigate through the different screens in a sensible manner. Those sliders and switches were only visual indicators and didn't have any logic attached at this point.

In the next iteration I started to work a bit on making things look nicer and decided to add some decoration on the buttons as well as change the font to a more stylized design. I also split  the song selection screen to have a clean look and allow for a relatively easy way to select the song difficulty.

Also, that little red play button will open the song on Ririsya's YouTube channel. :)

I also added an animated result screen, in parallel with implementing the performance rating system. See video below (no audio).

For the next and current iteration, I replaced the plain white background on the buttons with a nice and flowy image, which greatly improved the visual look. I also added flashy visual effects to the play screen, score and combo counter. Bloom always looks nice!

I had to rearrange a bunch of screen elements into proper layers to get the bloom effect to show on the correct elements, as in the beginning it was getting applied to all the screen and you could see Riri shining brightly on the side (it looked funny, but not what I was going for, hahaha)

Not related to the visual appearance, but in this iteration I also added menu and result music, as well as sound effects.

Thank you for reading!

I'll keep working hard on the game and post more updates here!

If you'd like to support me, please consider sending a donation: https://ko-fi.com/softdevwu