It's been a couple of months since I worked on Infinite Treasure due to me moving house from one end of the UK to the other and getting a hefty dose of COVID at the same time. I've blown the dust off of Unity and am ready to build the iteration of the game that should make it much more replayable (XP, power-ups and unlockables). Before that, I want to first recap the update I pushed out before my move: Alpha v7. This was the biggest change visually so far and probably the first time the entire game has been presented without unpolished placeholder content.

New level art

I've slowly been feeding my placeholder level art to my artist to convert it into something more presentable and three-dimensional. I was embarrassed to still be using flat images of gems that I'd scraped off the Internet, so fixing this was a priority.

Firstly, the Level 1 gems got "beautified":

Comparing them with the previous images in-game:

Level 3 got a new theme altogether. It had previously been the gloomiest level, being an experiment in a more atmospheric theme. I wanted to replicate the feeling of being a homeless person walking through a darkened street in the pouring rain, picking coins off the floor. Something melancholic and reflective of the harsh reality some people live in. I even looked for some moody jazz blues to play in the background, but never found what I wanted. The problem with using coins as collectibles was that they all looked pretty similar and dull to look at.

With that in mind, I sought a new theme. Again, Level 3 was to act as a testing ground for a new type of theme: one based on the environment rather than the items being collected. I chose "Japanese pond" as it fit well with the sound therapy I'd been using in Relax Mode. I picked some objects and animals that I thought you might see in such a pond and had my artist produce images of them floating or emerging from the water:

The results were more detailed than the assets for the other levels so I zoomed the camera in a bit to capture them. The rain animation and ambient water sounds remain, though the thunder has been removed.

New UI

I've already discussed the changes to Infinite Treasure's UI in "Making the UI suck less", but here's a before-after comparison to recap:

Alpha v7 also gave some love to the "game over" screen in Challenge Mode. This was previously a modal that appeared at the end of a run and showed your score and stars. I wanted to give players more feedback than that so they could better understand the difference between a good run and a bad run, something that I'm still struggling to communicate to players in-game. The modal has been replaced by a dedicated screen for showing your run stats, with accuracy, speed and personalised feedback added:

My hope is that this will encourage players to retry more times and increase the likelihood that they start to improve their skills. It would be highly gratifying to see someone jump ahead of me on the leaderboards!

Quality-of-life improvements

I wanted to replicate the "instant retry" feature from Trials Evolution to tighten the learning cycle for players and accelerate their growth. To retry Challenge Mode, you previously had to back out to the Level Select menu and then open the level again. This has been remedied with a restart button in the top right:

Another issue with Challenge Mode was that it wasn't obvious to players that not collecting an item when tapping the screen (i.e. missing) was a bad thing. I added some visual reinforcement by having the word "MISS" pop out of the tap location and showing a red ring around the screen similar to how damage is visualised in FPS games like Call of Duty:

Analytics

The final notable change in Alpha v7 is the introduction of Google Analytics (GA). It's hard to improve the game based on qualitative feedback alone - I need data to see how players are actually behaving as this can be a useful indicator of what works and what doesn't. The main thing I want to understand right now is whether players gravitate more towards Relax Mode or Challenge Mode and how long they play each mode. If one is obviously more compelling than the other, this will be a signal to invest more time into that mode.

Adding analytics required me to add a privacy policy link and age gate to make the app COPPA compliant. This disables the analytics for anyone who declares they are 16 years old or under and is intended to protect the privacy of children.

This was my first brush with analytics in a game - I'll be looking to improve the quality of the GA data I'm collecting to answer more valuable questions about how people play the game. I also want to test out Unity Analytics as GA data is fiddly to explore and visualise.

Wrapping up

Infinite Treasure also has a Discord now! This is linked from the main menu in the app. I'll be using this to build a community, collect feedback and share development updates. It's early days so there's nobody there yet, but I'd love it if you were the first to join!

I'd love to know what you think of the game and how I can improve it - if you have an Android phone, give it a try! I want to make this game the best it can possibly be and can't do that without your feedback and insights. I'm incredibly grateful to anyone who plays the game and reaches out to talk about their experience with it.

Cheers!

James