Sweet Ride update: Donuts, Cassette Tapes, and More

It’s been a while since I’ve shared some of our progress on Sweet Ride, so here’s a quick update. First off, here’s some recent in game footage:

Some of those recent changes include

• New camera angle- we brought the camera closer to the board with a wider field of view. The end result should help emphasis the height of the jump.
• Seamless lava and new fireballs- some tweaks to the lava levels
• Coin counter works- And it saves your state too
• New health meter- more details on that below
• In app-purchase and other buttons working
• Rats chase you as you roll across a level
• New intro animation

The pizza health meter (in the upper left hand corner) was driving me nuts. It looked terrible and was in need of redesign. It was a remnant of an older version of the game, where you were delivering pizza, and the image looked like it wasn’t scaling properly. At the same time, players were saying it wasn’t obvious that collecting donuts in the game would add to your life. So I made the health-meter a donut and it makes the game ten times better. It is “Sweet Ride” after all.

via GIPHY

I spent some time working on buttons in the game and got the idea to make the pause screen a cassette tape.

via GIPHY

Here’s a little timelapse of that… where you can see me starting on one thing, and working up the idea of doing the tape.

Making buttons for our Sweet Ride game with @MadeInHexels pic.twitter.com/ubbMvRad8a

— Doctor Popular (@DocPop) June 30, 2016

We are trying to figure out what steps we need to get the game ready to ship as early as possible. These include:

more creatures added (pigeons and others)

add new pause and game ending screens

music and sound effects

add rails for players to grind across

High scores and other info in the game ending screen

add more hoverboards